


putting out fire (with gasoline)

by orphan_account



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Childhood Trauma, Comic Backstory (partially), Comics/Movie Crossover, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, M/M, Murder, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Sexual Abuse, Plot Twists, Pre-Canon, Ravager Family, Recovery, Slavery, Slow Platonic Burn, Stockholm Syndrome, Team Bonding, Team as Family, for GOTG 2, kill ALL the rapists, reluctant mom-Aleta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-05-31
Packaged: 2019-11-06 03:43:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17932199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Aleta never wanted to invite her ex-husband's new pet aboard her galleon. She certainly never intended tolikehim.In which Aleta Ogord accidentally adopts Yondu Udonta.





	1. see these eyes so green

**Author's Note:**

> **The Aleta & Yondu fic I promised. Things get darker - you have been warned - and you're all going to want to murder me by the final chapter. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it!**

Aleta had shared her physical form with a man for a very long time. More than long enough to cultivate a healthy disdain. Inviting one aboard her galleon - to join her crew! - did not appeal.

Stakar didn’t expect an argument. He'd made that clear at the meeting, his stare boring into each captain in turn and lingering longest on her. Thankfully, if there was one thing Aleta excelled at, it was defying expectations.

“Why me?”

Her gauntlets struck the ancient stone table, hard enough to spark. The boom echoed around the deserted hall, bouncing off each empty seat. Those seats were arranged in a circle around the fusion core’s luminous vat. One hundred hover-chairs, floating above their mounts in gravimetric stasis. One for each of the ninety-nine factions' representatives, and one left empty, home only to cobwebs and the dead.

Aleta had been known to rest her feet on it on occasion, but not even she dared sit.

“You have other captains. Why not pick one?”

Stakar pretended to be engrossed in his latest bank blueprint. “If you wish to complain, I keep a rota of office hours outside my cabin.”

Aleta snorted. “Yeah, like you’re so busy now. Answer the question, Ogord. _Why._ _Me_.”

Stakar shuffled his datapads. He'd been pinning entry points on a three-dimensional blueprint, jamming it full of the holographic equivalent of thumb tacks.

“Because,” he said, when it became apparent the snarling apparition beside him wasn't going to go away if he ignored it, “I trust you.”

“Bullshit.” Out of all the captains, three had attempted to murder Stakar at some point. Only one, however, continued to do so at bi-yearly intervals, whenever he beat her at A'askavarian poker. If Stakar trusted her, he deserved death. “That ain't a reason.”

“ _Ain't_? My, we have been living with pirates a long while. How time flies.”

“Time flies, does it?” She sneered through her lank web of a fringe. “I wake every morning grateful that my _husband_ cannot take my body whenever he pleases.”

Stakar swivelled his chair, dismissing the map with a wave. “We only had one body between us, dear. It's not as if I had a choice.”

“That my _husband,_ ” continued Aleta, croaking hoarse as the crows she'd fed from her balcony on Arcturus, so many eons ago, “can’t stop me from saving our own damn children.”

Sometimes-husband, sometimes-brother, sometimes-Admiral. No matter which role he fell into, Stakar always gave her the same look. It appeared whenever she brought up the past: a fond sort of annoyance, as one might direct at a puppy that had piddled on the rug. Aleta detested it almost as much as the rest of him.

“I won’t chew old grudges with you, Aleta. Not now. Yondu needs our help.”

“Yondu needs _your_ help."

“Yondu needs _our_ help. We work together, remember?”

“Only when _you_ summon me. My faction manages fine on our own.”

“What, prancing about and performing those barbaric Blooding ceremonies? Starving out on the fringe of occupied space?” Stakar shook his head. “The offer is always open for you to come home, Aleta. Remember that, next time you lose yourself in Beyonder-territory.”

“That was _one time...”_

Aleta paused. Her temper was a vicious thing, a whip that could lash out and refurl fast as a skyllar-beast's barbed tongue. Stakar knew this. He also knew how best to distract her, just as he knew that the Blooding only happened to those who deserved it. He was trying to goad her. He wouldn’t succeed.

“I will not take him,” she said. “He's a man. That makes him _your_ responsibility.”

Stakar met her eyes. His were just as hooded, just as ancient, just as tired. “You haven't met him."

"I don't intend to. Why would I have interest in your latest pet..."

Stakar's teeth flashed. “Do _not_ call him - !”

“...Project,” Aleta finished. “Oh dear. You're already attached. Well, I want even less of a part in this now.” She patted her once-husband's cheek. “I leave you to enjoy your inevitable spiral into sentiment and madness. I'm headed back to my regular hunting grounds.” She paused. “Unless you fancy a round in the sack, for old times’ sake?”

He didn't dare. Typical.

“Well then.” The clawed tip of her gauntlet scraped Stakar's jaw, flicking off his chin sharp enough to scratch. “Be seeing you, darling. Tell your _project_ I said hi.”

 

* * *

 

 

She commed Luta on the long stomp to the docking bays. “Why the fuck did Stakar build such a huge ship? I swear it grows every time I visit.”

Luta, accustomed to being pinged over every vital question that plagued her captain's mind, rubbed sleep grit from her eyes and did her utmost to look attentive. “Perhaps he adds to it, cap’n.”

“That'll be it. He never did seem satisfied with our marital cave. Perhaps interior design is a hidden passion.”

Her lieutenant's smirk pulled on her scar. “Permission to speak candidly, captain.”

“Please.”

“When mammalian men reach a certain age, it typically coincides with a decline in sexual prowess and an obsession with big ships.”

Very candid indeed. Aleta chuckled, unzipping her jacket to let in some air.

Her clan hunted at the tatty outskirts of civilized space: the empty swathes between stars populated only by the occasional satellite, a refugee ship far off course, the lost and the lurking, those who didn't want to be found. Few planets were fully terraformed. If you wanted to survive, you had to be ready for any and all terrain. On Stakar's cushy mothership, her thermo-regulatory coat lining and hobnailed boots felt rather redundant.

Blue-leathers scurried to clear her path. She ignored them. They might wear the flame on their sleeve, but that only made them _Ravager,_ not _crew_.

The green faction abided by the Code. They divvied their wages and presented a cut of their earnings to the communal pot. But they hadn't flown in formation for decades. So long as Aleta steered their helm, they never would.

“Prepare the pad for my shuttle,” she told Luta. Then, before Luta thought she'd gotten away with it: “You do realize Stakar and I are the same age?”

Luta turned delectably wan. Still sniggering, Aleta snapped off the comm.

 

* * *

 

 

It was as she was stalking past the mess hall that she heard it.

A noise.

Not just any noise. There were plenty to choose from: the _Starhawk_ soundscape combined the scuff of boots on steel, the rustle of leathers, the warbles of _make way for Captain Aleta_. No. This noise was _tuneful._

Whistly, to be precise.

Aleta's stride slowed. She cocked her head, eyes slivering as she tried to work out where...

The wall? Surely not. And yet...

Aleta glanced around. Her stretch of hallway had emptied faster than if she’d dropped a frag grenade. The corridor curved ahead and behind, the walls clad in sleek chrome plate. It was a step up from the early days, when she and Stakar dredged an ancient galleon from a junk pile, stitched and stapled it with scrap, and launched it – along with all their hopes and dreams – full throttle for the stars.

No more dangling live wires, no bare plasma coils. Nowadays the _Starhawk_ was an apex predator. It whorled around a vast internal helix, a nautilus cast in chrome, pitted through with boreholes and interconnecting ladder shafts. And, of course, the air vents.

Aleta frowned. She rapped on the wall, disrupting the whistly chorus on its third repetition. The peeping cut off, followed by a scrabble, then silence.

“I can hear you, you know.”

The silence persisted.

Aleta walked to the nearest grate, set in the wall a foot above her head. “Come on out,” she ordered, with the casual authority one developed after a few centuries in charge of a pirate crew.

The vent remained unmoved.

Aleta's eye twitched. It had been a long time since she was disobeyed. “You can't stay in there forever.”

The silence suggested otherwise.

“It's not good to sit so close to the oxygenerators. Air's too pure; poisons you after a while.”

A quiet scoff. Aleta copied it. So, they wanted to play rough?

She slid her pistol from its holster and aimed at the wall - then, after a moment's thought, adjusted. An inch to compensate for distortion through the piping. Another just in case. Close enough to spook, not graze.

“Last chance."

The wall made no reply.

Aleta shrugged.

“Your funeral,” she said, at which point Martinex barrelled around the corner, accompanied by a jittery underling.

“See, sir!” she gabbled. “I told you, I did! The Spider – she’s trying to scupper our ship!”

Honestly. No respect for elders.

“Shaddup, frail. I'm just dealing with your vermin problem.”

Martinex absorbed the scene. “Aleta? The hell's going on?”

“You have a stowaway. I'm scaring 'em out, simple as.”

“A stowaway?” the girl echoed.

Aleta leered at her between clumps of oil-slick black hair. “If you wanna help, I could always pack you up there after them.”

Martinex sighed: a pure, high note of crystal under stress. “Don't shoot,” he said. “It's only Yondu."

 _Yondu_. The Kree brat Stakar was using to tap into his estranged wife’s nurturing side.

Well, that settled it. Aleta pulled the trigger.

 

* * *

 

 

Stakar was disappointed. That was okay; Aleta was used to that.

He turned between them: her, sunk to a bored squat, elbows rested on her bent knees; Martinex, exuding an aura so cool that frost tipped the spines on his cheeks; and the underling – a skrull whose name Aleta did her utmost not to remember.

“I don't care who started it,” said their Admiral. “I just want to know what happened...”

Aleta opened her mouth.

“...From Martinex.”

Aleta shut her mouth again. She put it to better use scowling. Tuning out Martinex’s dreary recitation, she focused on the wall.

If she concentrated – and extracted the wax from her nearest ear – the grinding ship systems didn’t quite eclipse the soft, hitching breaths of a boy in pain.

Shit. She hadn’t _meant_ to clip him. But intention, as Aleta learnt over the seven-odd centuries of her life, held very little relevance.

You did things. Sometimes people survived as a result, which meant your action was ‘good’. Sometimes they died, in which case you were deemed ‘bad’. Fate was one massive clanking, groaning machine, and while mortals might pump the pistons, they could never guess how the cogs would turn. For now, Aleta contented herself that she'd stopped the brat whistling.

“Aleta.”

Aleta glanced up. She extracted her finger from her ear, chewing the crumbly orange crescent of earwax from its tip. “Yeah?”

Stakar nodded to the duct.

Aleta looked at it. Aleta looked at him. Aleta shook her head. “No way in hell.”

“The rest of us won’t fit.”

Aleta pointed at the girl, who shrunk back with wide eyes. “Uh, Skrull? A shapeshifter?”

Stakar lay a hand on the Skrull's shoulder. If he was trying to calm her, he made a poor job of it; she only looked more inclined to piss herself. Curse Stakar for building that ridiculous mythos around himself – the _Lights of Ogord_ and all. He’d be lucky if he got out of this without the kid asking for his autograph.

Of course, while Stakar was busy making himself a god, the Spider span her own webs. Her legends were no less potent, although they tended to induce nightmares rather than hero-worship.

“Saveen here didn’t _shoot him,"_ Stakar said. "Martinex, take her back to your galleon.”

Martinex nodded, pushing from where he'd propped his shoulder on the wall. The boy in the vent squeaked. The chime of the Pluvian’s crystal coating must sound like a pistol report from in there, warped by the roar of the fans.

Ridiculous, Aleta thought. If the kid couldn’t take a scratch from a plasma bolt, he didn’t deserve the flame.

Why did Stakar pick him up in the first place? A mad thing who made his home in the vents like a rabid Orloni? Martinex claimed he hadn’t emerged for anything other than food, and that only with reluctance. He was hardly an asset.

“If I go in there,” she said, jerking her chin at the vent. “It doesn’t mean I’m agreeing to this. You understand, you old dog? I ain’t said yes to _shit._ ”

Stakar cracked the first proper grin she’d gotten out of him all day. It looked tired, more so than she remembered. Time didn’t age the pair of them, but stress did, and the thick curls that sprouted from her once-husband’s scalp were peppered through with silver. Positioning himself under the hole, he interlaced his fingers and gave her an imperious nod.

Aleta eked great enjoyment from planting her grubby boot on his palm, then the mounts of his solar wings. Once she was buried to the chest, there wasn’t enough space to twist around and enjoy Stakar’s dismay.

It was dark. Dark and dusty and _dry._ The air cycled constantly, so arid it stung Aleta’s eyeballs and made the inside of her nostrils prickle.

Kid must’ve squirmed himself in feet-first. Light filtered from behind the fan at the rear of the vent. Dappling through the grills, interrupted by the blades’ steady whirl, it filled this tunnel with a ripple of gold.

Another beam sliced diagonally across the tunnel, streaming through the punctured hole left by her plasma bolt. It illuminated a languid spiral of dust, twisting and turning, disturbed by her breath.

Aleta shuffled closer. “Hey,” she said.

Ahead of her, a lump shifted. It could’ve been an old dent in the piping from a boarding long ago. Or it could be a miserable Kree kid, cupping the leak in his shoulder.

Aleta squirmed forwards on her elbows and belly, pulling herself along like a worm. Her legs stuck out in the corridor, kicking now and then – as Stakar discovered, when he strayed too close.

“Oof.”

Served him right. If he wanted to eavesdrop, he could press his damn ear to the wall like anyone else.

“Alright,” she said, swallowing the cough as dust tickled her throat. “Introductions. I'm Aleta. I shot you, but you kinda deserved it.”

The walls almost smothered Stakar's sigh. “Aleta, _please._ ”

Aleta ignored him. The mound shifted again. Two eyes cracked, dust spilling from the lashes. Pink, shiny with unshed tears. The glare they pinned her with was nothing short of poisonous.

Her grin slunk out slow. “Now _that’s_ the face of a Ravager.”

“I ain’t no _Ravager,_ ” the boy hissed. His breath hit her in rank gusts, like wind off a garbage heap. One sniff told Aleta that the Kree didn’t give their slaves dental.

"Feel free to tell that to Stakar."

The boy snapped his broken teeth. Aleta didn't let it put her off. Cracked nails scraped her gauntlets as she caught his brittle-thin wrists. “Leggo! Geddoff! Thief! Pirate _whore!_ ”

“Yeah,” said Aleta, flipping her dusty hair from her eyes. “You and me, we’re gonna get along _great._ ”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **As always, kudos and reviews = my undying love. There will, of course, be a little Kragdu later on, but not for a while. It's very much in-the-background.**


	2. i can stare for a thousand years

Yondu wished to be left in the vent to die like the roach he was. This much was evident.

Aleta would gladly have left him to it, if it hadn’t been for Stakar – and, perhaps, a glimmer of guilt, as she yanked the boy forwards and the light from the hole glanced off his blood-slicked shoulder.

Not a deep cut. Not serious either – no arteries nicked. Yondu wouldn’t be fighting nearly so furiously if they had been. But when Aleta dug her thumb into it he _howled,_ howled like a dog, and did his utmost to claw out her eyes. Aleta fought back, elbows clonking off the walls.

“All fine,” she heard Stakar say to a passing brace of Ravagers. “Nothing to see here. I’ve got it under control.”

“Under control, my ass,” she muttered.

The boy didn’t stop flailing - but a snigger cracked out of him, harsh and desperate, a breath away from a sob. Aleta uttered a laugh of her own.

“Hey, Stakar! It’s got a sense of humor!”

" _He,_ " said Stakar, stiffly. Aleta wasn't listening. The little rat hadn't taken the compliment; in fact, it did its best to prove her wrong. Its thrashing kicked up a sandstorm. Dust bit Aleta’s eyes. She shut them, breathing as shallowly as possible. She’d lost her grip, but now she found it again, and hollered “Now!” behind her.

Stakar heaved. Aleta _strained,_ grasping the boy by his forearms.

A slither, a clang. Then the pair of them burst from the vent in a filthy explosion and landed – very satisfyingly – on their Admiral.

Yondu bounded up, quick as the wounded beast he was. He scuttled away, keeping his back pressed to the wall. A slim gold rod shone in his hand. It looked like an arrow. Hardly the most formidable weapon, without an accompanying bow.

Aleta could’ve grabbed him – could’ve whipped out her pistol and relieved him of his kneecaps. But there was something in his eyes. Something she’d seen in some of her girls.

 _Please,_ those eyes begged. _Don’t hold me down._

Aleta frowned, hand frozen at her holster. Hesitation. Stupid. But Yondu didn't attack. He sidled to the corner, hand grasping air behind him, and lurched around it, suspicious red eyes fixed on her until the last possible moment.

Then he was gone.

Aleta relaxed, enjoying the warm rise and fall of Stakar’s chest between her legs. “You couldn’t have given him pants?” she asked.

Stakar sighed. He rested his head on the floor, patting her calf. “He won’t wear them.”

“What happens if you take his loincloth away?”

“He walks around naked.”

Aleta snorted. “Stars, that must’ve offended your delicate sensibilities.”

Stakar’s forehead ruckled. “I don’t have _delicate sensibilities.”_

“Darling, you never wanted to fuck anywhere but the cabin.”

The hands on her calves kneaded, pushing warmth into the muscle. Big, warm hands, coarser than they used to be when she was the princess and he the senator’s adopted son. “That’s because our definitions of _public_ and _private_ spaces are very different, my dear.”

Aleta smirked, leaning over him. “An M-ship cockpit is a private space.”

Stakar’s little grimace made her heart sing. “Not when it’s docked in a functioning, busy hangar. Certainly not when the windscreens are on their translucent setting.”

“Spoilsport.”

Stakar’s hands migrated from calf to hip. Before Aleta could wriggle down, seat herself more comfortably, she was unceremoniously lifted and set to one side. “This is not a private space either.”

"God, you've gotten boring." Aleta slunk to her feet. Stakar followed her, expression turning artfully bland as his hip clicked. Aleta barged it with her own. “Getting old?”

“Don’t I know it. So. Yondu.”

Stakar had this miraculous gift, one that not centuries of mutual irritation and grudge-holding could ease. No matter what hells he put Aleta through, no matter how many nights she spent strangling her blankets as her children shrieked for her in her dreams, whenever she let Stakar down, a lead ball would drop in her belly, mashing her entrails to guilty pulp.

“I can’t,” she said brusquely. “He said it himself; he’s no Ravager. We don’t pressgang, Stakar – that’s part of the Code.”

She hadn’t outright accused him of breaking it, but it was close enough for Stakar to assess her with a colder glare than usual. “Yondu doesn’t know what he wants. He’s hurt, Aleta. Damaged. I can’t just release him to the wild –“

“You realize you’re talking about a person, not a zoo creature?”

Stakar’s _gotcha_ smile was as infuriating as ever. “You were calling him ‘it’ a minute ago. I consider this an improvement.”

She could say _consider this_ and introduce her clenched gauntlet to his nose. The temptation gnawed on her; she toyed with it as a cat might with an orloni kit, batting it back and forth between her paws. But with Stakar, rising to the bait only played you into his hands.

“He needs help,” she said, simply. “Help he ain’t gonna get as part of a crew.”

Stakar’s eyebrow made its well-trekked hike towards his hairline. “I know you’ve taken women from… similar backgrounds.”

“Those same women won’t thank for me for allowing a man aboard.”

“If what’s between his legs matters so much, I can show you his medical records. Mainframe hacked them out of the Warship database when we retrieved him. They might change your mind.”

“Kidnapped him, you mean?”

“Rescued.” Stakar’s eyes flashed; a corona around the pupil, a glint of starshine flaring in their depths. “You realize he was a slave?”

“A slave who doesn’t want to be here.” Aleta scrolled back through the past conversation, mouth tightening to a bloodless line. “And I might be a bitch, Stakar, but I don’t share the intricacies of other people’s anatomy while they ain’t even in the room.”

Stakar actually looked stumped, for a moment. He disarmed his next protest before it had the chance to leave his verbal trebuchet. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Aleta snorted. She didn’t need to hear apologies. “You certainly ain’t gonna be any help to him. I suggest dropping him off at the nearest Nova refugee port.”

“You’ve seen what goes on in those hell pits. Breeding grounds for flies. They won’t be able to keep a close eye on him, not like we can.”

“That’s why I found him squashed in a vent, whistling to himself like a fucking child?” She frowned. “ _Is_ he a child?”

“Medical records say that he’s twenty. Malnutrition accounts for the size.” Stakar watched Aleta warily, as if he expected her to snap at him for revealing that detail too. “Will you at least consider it?"

“No."

"Aleta..."

"I said no. He’s your problem. You work it out.” His expression made that lead weight crush deeper into her guts. Aleta ground her teeth. “Krugarr knows the mind. Get his help.”

“He’s agreed to weekly sessions, but says it isn’t healthy for anyone to live with their therapist. ‘Fosters dependency’; I believe those were his words.”

The last time she and Krugarr met, he offered her help for the ‘pain in her mind’. That pain was her children. Stakar might be ready to forget them, abandon them in the vaulted caverns of their past, but Aleta would not, could not follow him.

“What’s wrong with you? Why can’t he stay here?”

Stakar’s face sagged, folding along ley lines born of melancholia and exhaustion. “I’m the one who saved him,” he said. “And I do believe he hates me for it.”

That was just on the revealing side of cryptic – Stakar’s specialty. “You saved him? From where - a Kree warship?”

“Correct." She was surprised to see grief in his eyes. They had witnessed many traumas over the centuries. Few clung on. But whatever Stakar found in that ship, it had latched onto him and sucked. “The Kree abandoned the vessel approximately two years ago. Left it adrift in the Galleon’s Graveyard.”

“Stars.” Surrounded on all sides by quantum asteroid field, the Galleon’s Graveyard contained the remains of a multitude of dead vessels, from luxurious cruisers to the crummy scavenger frigates that had tried to rob them, and paid the ultimate price. “Only slaves left?”

“Only one alive.”

Aleta scratched her scalp, gauntlets catching and tugging at the greasy black roots. “The hell was he eating?”

"What do you think?"

Untrusting red eyes. _Don’t hold me down._ Blood splattered in the dark, running viscous, clogged with ancient dust.

“Fuck, Stakar. Two damn years?”

“There was a working refrigeration unit. He was smart enough to freeze those he killed before they rotted.”

She tried to imagine it – the lights churning on low-power, life support steadily cranking off one compartment at a time, month by month, until there was nothing left but a bloody mouthed boy and his freezer of meat. “Fuck.”

Stakar nodded. “Exactly.”

“I’ll think about it. Taking him, I mean.” The words wormed out of her mouth without her permission. Aleta shook her head, making a hasty amendment: “No promises, though. Give me a week. I’ll talk to the girls, come to a consensus. If they agree, Yondu’s got himself a bed and a uniform. So long as he puts his back into the work and don’t give me or the girls no grief, we’ll put him up as long as he needs.”

Stakar looked damn near ready to tear up. “Thank you, Aleta. I can’t express how much this –“

“Shut it.” Aleta turned her back on him, curving into her usual predatory hunch. She lurched around the corridor in the same direction Yondu had vanished, heading towards the docks. “Not doing it for you.”

 

* * *

 

 

 

Charity was all fine and good in theory. Same with mercy, honesty, and every other value celebrated by most functioning democratic societies in the quadrant.

Except the A’askavarians, of course. Fuck knew what went on in their freaky little heads.

But the point was, you didn’t take on a job without flicking through the specs. Similarly, you didn’t adopt an ex-Kree slave without thoroughly grilling the admiral on his details. Aleta would’ve gladly accepted any information on Yondu Stakar had to offer – beyond what the boy was packing, which was his own damn business.

(Stakar forwarded the medical records along with the rest of Yondu’s raw data onto her holopad. Aleta marked it for the attention of her onboard practitioner, and otherwise left well enough alone.)

However, there was one vital detail that Stakar left out. One that became apparent to Aleta, as she clambered the ladder to her shuttle’s cockpit, and a primed and thrumming blaster barrel prodded the back of her head.

“Take me back,” Yondu growled, his wounded arm flopping limp. The hand that held the pistol didn’t waver, although it locked out straight in a way that told Aleta its owner had never fired a gun.

Strange. Wasn’t the boy supposed to be a battle slave?

Yondu bared his rotten teeth. He thrust the pistol forwards, clocking her painfully on the crown. “Take me back to my master, you _thief._ ”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you so much for every kudos and comment :kissyface:**


	3. colder than the moon

“Where’d you get the gun?” That was the first thing Aleta asked. Yondu adjusted his grip, fingers sliding clumsy on the rubber.

“Left it on yer chair.”

She had, as well. Stupid.

“How’d you know which ship was mine?”

“Didn’t. Told the other thieves you was takin’ me with ya. They pointed me right over.” He preened; she saw it in their reflection on the windscreen, having turned the cockpit glass opaque in case Stakar fancied a romp.

“Well, ain't you clever.”

“Master always says so.”

Aleta breathed out, hand sliding from where it had snapped on automatic to her own holster. “You know your master’s dead," she said, rough and low. "Don’t you?”

Yondu shook his head. Not quite hard enough to distract himself, allow her to twist in a blur of green leather and deal a vicious aerial kick to his temple. But almost. “No he ain’t. He got on the escape pods, I saw. He’s comin’ back for me. I just gotta get back to that ship…”

Fucking pathetic. But kinda tragic, too. Like a puppy that’s been kicked so often it starts to crave it.

Aleta met Yondu’s eyes in the glass. “That Kree junk’s floating in the middle of a quantum asteroid zone. It’s called ‘The Galleon’s Graveyard’ for a reason.”

“You got fast ships. It’s possible.”

“Ravagers only risk their necks for each other. You ain’t Ravager.”

Yondu chewed his lip. “Give me the ship then,” he demanded, jabbing the pistol against her head. “I’ll go myself.”

“You’ll die,” said Aleta shortly. “You ever flown before?”

The silence fumed gently, before pressure burst from Yondu’s mouth in a rush. “It can’t be that hard! I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

“Awful lot of care for a man who owned you. A man who left you to die.”

“He had no _choice…_ ”

“Could’ve taken you with him.”

“The escape pods were single-seat! He – he’ll be back. I just gotta wait for him, I just gotta…”

If the truth didn’t get through to him, nothing would. Aleta gave up on it. “You ain’t taking my ship,” she said.

Yondu whistled. It was a high noise, a pure one, a shrill little cheep that made hairs stand erect on Aleta’s spine. She worked out the tension, cracking her neck from one side to the other, sneering at the dull cockpit glass.

“That supposed to do something?”

Yondu sunk his shoulders. The pistol dipped, just a fraction. “S’ppose not.”

Something unspoken lurked there. Aleta didn’t care what. For now, she smelt an opportunity: the sour tang of disappointment in Yondu’s sweat. Whatever he expected to happen hadn’t, and the pistol slipped again – warm metal buzzing against Aleta's back.

“I’ll give you the ship,” she croaked. As predicted, Yondu pulled away.

“Really?”

“No.”

She ducked forwards, into the gap between pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. Just in time – the shot whizzed overhead, eating into the glass.

“Shit,” Aleta muttered, glowering out the hole. “Now I gotta waste a patch.”

“You – you _liar_ –“

The rebound set Yondu off balance. The pistol smacked his weedy chest. Aleta adjusted her aim accordingly. She gripped the arm of each chair and donkey-kicked.

Hobnails slammed Yondu’s bruised ribs. The boy bleated, staggering, choking on spit.

Every M-ship had the same basic structure. The cockpit bubble rose several meters above the main hull. It could be accessed via ladder shaft, or by popping the canopy and swarming over the wing.

Similarly, every M-ship pilot learnt to dodge around that ladder shaft while navigating the inside of their craft. It was a null zone in Aleta’s mind; her boots had trodden so many times around it that if she tried to purposefully set them down on the gap, they’d resist. It’s be like trying to gnaw off her own finger.

Yondu didn’t have that instinct.

His heel clipped air. He wailed something in Kree-cant, interspersed with clicks and a pitiful whistle. And then he vanished, devoured by the dark.

Aleta stood, brushing down the front of her jacket. She smoothed her hair over her face, revolving her hip joint until it stopped making pops. Been a while since she threw that move without a battle to warm her up.

“You alive?” she called. “Didn’t break your neck?”

She tried not to sound hopeful. On the one hand, Stakar would be even more disappointed than usual, but on the other, it would prevent her from having to explain to Luta and the rest why a man was on their rosters.

Yondu swore at her in response. Aleta didn’t understand the fast-spat consonants, but his tone conveyed all it needed to.

She chortled to herself, swaggering to the hole. The boy crumpled between two reticulated crates of protein-cubes, his blue skin washed waxy by solars. Down there, at the bottom of the shaft, he looked like a bird with snapped wings, fluttering in the burrow of a snake.

“Liar,” he hissed. The graze from her bolt dripped – he’d knocked off the scab during their tussle. “You lied to me!”

Aleta shrugged. “Ravager.”

She jumped. He threw up his hands, futile as it was, and whistled again – a last-moment, instinctual defence.

Aleta didn’t land on him. She hit the crates on either side, one boot on each stack. Her pistol shimmered in her fist, eel-grey, the plasma bolt jittering for freedom at the tip. Its glow lit her a ghastly, radioactive green, highlighting the bones of her skull.

“Hand me your gun now, son.”

Yondu muttered ‘liar’ and ‘thief’ a whole bunch more times. He sneered at the pistol, and her, for long enough that Aleta’s heartbeat thudded in her ears, steady and strong as galley drums.

This was the bit you could never predict.

Would he do it? Go out in one last stand – turn her gun back on her, in the vain hope of pulling the trigger before she put hers to use?

“Don’t,” she said softly.

His eyes flicked to hers. Just as desperate as they had been in the tunnels. _Don’t hold me down._

“I got the high ground, kid. It’s time to let go.”

Yondu’s throat shook around his gulp. “Take me back to my master,” he reiterated, holding the pistol in his trembling hands. His shoulder dribbled red. “Thief.”

“First rule.”

Aleta pivoted, weight on one foot. She booted the gun. It snapped from Yondu’s grip, wrenching his fingers back with it.

He didn’t yell, though his jaw ticked twice. Aleta didn’t spare a moment asking herself when he got so resistant to pain. She levelled her weapon, towering over him, the winking cockpit lights cutting her out from her background in a green-black silhouette.

“Ravagers steal from everyone, ‘cept each other.”

"I told you, I ain’t no Ravager!”

“Which is good.” Aleta crouched on her crates while Yondu squirmed on the floor beneath, unsure whether to watch her pistol or her face. Aleta made the choice for him, bonking the barrel off his forehead. “Because otherwise I’d have to kill you for taking my gun.”

Yondu snarled, fearless despite the plasma ball charging an inch away. “You stole _me_! Per’aps I oughta kill _you_!”

“You could try. You wouldn’t get far." She showed off a yellowed eyetooth of her own. "Do they talk of the Spider, when you’re packed into your cages at night?”

Yondu tried to focus on the gun, but finding it too close for his eyes to register as anything but a blur, he raised his gaze to hers instead. “Personal slaves get put in cages when they do bad shit. Like lettin' themselves get stolen by a _thief._ ”

 _Personal slave._ Great. “Thought you was a battler.”

Yondu acclimatized quickly to having a conversation with a pistol muzzle between his eyes. “It’s the war, y’know? The Xandarian monsters. Infidels! They keep killin’ our men. You know my master’s an Accuser?”

He looked proud of it too. Aleta’s lip curled. She knew the rites, knew the quantity of blood required to whet a warhammer.

Yondu blathered on, oblivious, mistaking the glint in her eyes for admiration. “One of the strongest! So when they start enlistin’ all the slaves, not just them what’re trained up for gladiators and crap, he’s gotta let some of his own go, right?” His grin wavered, just a fraction. “He didn’t have no choice.”

Aleta stifled her yawn. “You’re sure he wasn’t just tired of you?”

 _That_ rekindled the fury. “He’s coming back for me! He said so! I gotta get back to the warship, I gotta, I gotta –“

Aleta twizzled the pistol in place, shutting him up. Her thoughts flashed back to what Stakar had revealed as they sat under the vent, dust drizzling from the shot-hole.

_If you take his loincloth, he runs around naked._

Faith kept the kid alive. Faith and all that bullshit the Kree drilled into their fuck-slaves from young. Most of ‘em rebelled against it, eventually – but Yondu? For Yondu, the determination that his master was coming back for him, that he cared for him... It had given him a reason to survive. To keep living, while everything around him descended into blood and meat and hell.

Now that was over, he had to learn to let go of his past or be dragged back down. One thing was for sure, though; he wouldn't drag Aleta with him.

“I’m losing patience,” she said.

Yondu’s thin face blanched. “You gotta help me. What if he goes back an’ I ain’t there?”

 _He’ll assume you were eaten,_ Aleta thought sourly, using her pistol to push him to and fro. _Just like all the rest._

“He’ll kill ya,” Yondu continued, voice slithering down its register. His grin was rotten as the foundations of every Empire: Kree, Xandarian, Arcturan alike. “He’ll kill y’all, when he finds out you stole me. He’s gonna paint the starways red with yer blood, demon. An’ then he’s gonna crack your bones and fuck yer children, an’ –“

“I have no children,” said Aleta. She tossed her gun up, caught it by the muzzle, and swung the hilt to meet his temple, hard.

 

* * *

 

 

“Long story short,” she drawled, poking the body with her toe. It twitched, winced, and issued a rattling moan. “He’s one of us now. Yondu, hon? Welcome to your new home.”

Luta frowned at her. Then the boy at her feet, then her again, then back in quick succession.

“He ain’t for Blooding?” she asked. Aleta sniggered.

“Nah. He’s alright.”

Luta uttered the tiniest of sighs. Then made hopeful side-eyes at her captain, in case she’d caught it. Aleta’s snort burst from her like a sneeze.

“Alright, alright. Hell, if the girls’re hungry, Spider’ll make webs. Gimme a hand here, yeah? Kid probably concussed himself, falling down that ladder hole. We better haul him along to the medbay – I’ve sent his specs ahead."

“Falling down a ladder hole,” Luta repeated. Aleta’s foot, planted atop of Yondu, covered the matching print of her boot-treads on his chest.

"Yep."

Luta gave her a long look. "Was he pushed?"

"Nope. Did this all to himself."

"Mm-hm. Gonna need you to stand aside, ma'am." Aleta did so. If her lieutenant saw the bruise, she didn't comment on it. She rolled Yondu up, across her ox-broad shoulders, and began the trudge for the medbay, captain trotting at her side.

Aleta’s ship, the _Arachna,_ had been constructed in the years before the Kree-Xandar war drained resources from the great masons’ yards at Nidavellir and Shiva’aq. No rationed hull plates or restrained interior space; oh no. Her ship was a gluttonous hive, built to be a fortress, its hull plates thicker than a Kronan was broad.

Like its eight-legged namesake, around its globular abdomen protruded several longer limbs. The _Arachna_ cannibalized a mining rig early on, one of the asteroid-eaters who trawled the Outer Rim, mining ice and precious ore to be shipped to the few hardscrabble settlements that survived out past Empire supply routes, and the ever-burgeoning arms trade. Now its arms were grafted onto her ship’s flanks, spindly from a distance yet each imbued with a crushing power more than able to wrench a rival vessel apart, baring its entrails to hard-vac.

Yondu surged awake halfway to the medbay, roused by Luta’s rolling gait and the pulse of a triple-fusion engine. That was outdated by intergalactic standards, but when you hunted the barren stretch between quasars around Galaxy’s Edge, you learned to make the most of what you had.

Every ship they encountered could expect to be autopsied while it still breathed, oxygenerators cycling feebly as the Spider laid bare its heart and rigged up the massive clamps to siphon plasma into their battery reserve. The engine had a half-life of a thousand years, so even if the newfangled models, perfected by Sakaaran war-tech, were nippier with the acceleration and far more efficient in terms of heat soakaway, the _Arachna’s_ would still outlive all her crew, maybe even her captain.

Yondu tried to flounder off Luta’s shoulders, thudding his bare blue feet against her side. He might as well be kicking a rockface. Luta chuckled to herself, giving the lad a pat.

“Lie still, little fool. You are injured.”

“I’ll injure y’all in a minute,” Yondu insisted. But his words slurred, and when he saw Aleta sauntering alongside him, he shot her a glare. “ _Ow._ The hell you do to me, whore?”

Luta’s steady tramping did not cease, but a storm brewed around her brows. “Mind how ya address the cap’n.”

Aleta’s girls were a chary lot, especially around new-folk. Even venturing this far into the common starways made them skittish. They emerged from the corridors around them, skulking after the captain and her charges. Tension twanging about the decks as if somebody plucked on a celestial lyre.

Aleta heard more than one hiss. _Man,_ they whispered, wide eyes peering through tangled hair, grubby leather rustling like the crow wings in the Arcturan fields.

_Hey, out the way! Lemme see, lemme –_

_Quit shovin’! Stars, izzat what I think it is?_

_Why has cap’n bought a man here?_

_Is he for cookin’? Maulin’?_

_No, lookit him. Skinny lil’ thing. Thin as a child._

_He’s bleeding. He run from cap’n, ya think?_

_Nah, he’d be in a worse state. They’s takin’ him to medbay._

_Why they take a man to medbay? Ain’t no men belong here._

Aleta deafened her ears to it. She set on her most dangerous grin, and strode forth like she had a plan.

A corridor impaled the _Arachna,_ from the main hangars at her thorax to the observation nodule that pronged from her hind end. The Bridge bulged in the centre. Together with the medbay it formed two halves of a wheel, the engine shaft its throbbing, luminous axle.

Having a Bridge window was a liability in the Black; provided a nice fat target for missile systems to lock on and shoot. Vast holoscreens tracked the parabolas of all debris and ships in scanner range, and the navs worked tirelessly, crunching code and inputting algorithms, steering them safely through the meteor fields.

In contrast to the Bridge’s flux of lights and sounds, the medbay was simple, spartan, and stark. Solar strips crosshatched the ceiling, ensuring no part of the room lurked in shadow.

Aleta employed every medic she could get her hands on. The Ravagers might not pressgang others into service, but if your ship ate a rival schooner and you gave the on-board medical and galley staff chance to defect rather than being cooked, spaced, or dumped on the nearest satellite, chances were they’d agree to your terms.

Aleta didn’t fuck with doctors. They had their own Code, whether they worked for pirate or police force, Xandar or Hala. They were welcome to follow their goodie-goodie, _cause-no-unnecessary-harm_ ways, so long as they respected her rules in return.

Janyi groaned when Aleta entered. She groaned even harder at the boy, slung across Luta’s shoulders.

“What’ve you done this time, captain?”

Mijo, Janyi’s latest and longest-lasting apprentice, winked at her. Or perhaps she just blinked. With that many eyes, it was difficult to tell.

“Done?” Aleta repeated, perching on the edge of the nearest gurney and easing her gauntlets from her tired hands. “You can blame this one on Stakar. He saddled me with the brat.”

Yondu retaliated with a fitful squirm, almost spasming off Luta’s back. “I ain’t a child!”

“Quit actin’ like one,” Aleta was fast to say, as Luta gathered his legs together and rolled him onto the bed Janyi indicated.

“Don’t mind cap’n,” she stage-whispered. “Everyone’s a child to her.”

True, Aleta supposed, pinging Janyi Yondu’s medical history – thank flark for meticulous Kree slave records – and settling her chin on her palms to watch. But some were more child than others.

Watching Yondu flinch from Janyi’s hands and thrash across the bed until Luta bundled him onto her lap in a restraining embrace, didn’t ignite any warmth in her chest. No compassion. Just frustration, that this kid was so willing to fling himself into space for the sake of a bastard who, as far as she could tell, had bedded him far too young and left him for dead.

“Lemme go – what’chu doin’ – get off me, woman! I ain’t stayin’ here – I gotta get back to my master!”

Janyi met Aleta’s eyes. She was of a tentacular consistency, gelatinous and glimmering softly with her own phosphorescence. She preferred to leave a slime trail, and while she kept it minimal out of courtesy, Mijo still darted about behind her with a mop and a bucket.

 _He doesn’t want to be here?_ Janyi’s gaze enquired.

Aleta glared back with an obstinate jut of her chin. _Well, he is. And he’s staying._

Janyi’s viscid browbone squelched a little lower. _So we’re keeping prisoners now?_

She could spare her judgement. Aleta stood, stalking to Yondu’s gurney. Luta had him restrained, her brawny arms twisting his to either side while her legs sandwiched his together, her ankles hooked on his shins. But still Yondu fought, wriggling like a worm on a hook, flashing those broken brown teeth.

Kid was a rough-houser, no doubt about that. How a little fuck-slave survived two years against more experienced battlers eluded her, but whatever feral depths Yondu dug into, it wouldn’t be easy to claw his way out.

“Listen,” she snapped. “You’re concussed. Janyi’s going to fix you. Shaddup and let her, or we tranquilize you.”

Janyi cleared her throat. Aleta scoffed.

“I. _I_ will tranquilize you. And I’ll enjoy it, too.” She turned her scowl on her doctor. “C’mon. You wouldn’t step in? He’s danger to himself and others.”

“The boy,” said Janyi as drily as possible for a person composed eighty percent out of mucus, “is merely alarmed. If he has recently awoken from unconsciousness, following head trauma caused by you –“

“He fell down the stairs!”

“The boot prints suggest otherwise. He simply needs time to orientate himself, to calm from his panic. Then we can talk this through, like civilized…“

She sludged a squidge too close. Yondu had gone suspiciously limp as they talked; now he revealed the underlying plot. He surged forth, fast enough to escape Luta’s grip.

Jaws clamped on Janyi’s nearest tendril.

Janyi _screamed._ And, of course, her natural defence mechanism kicked in.

Five minutes later, Aleta rubbed the filthy towel over her face, wringing black gunk from her hair. Janyi shot the ink-splattered Yondu sour glares, while Mijo fetched the mop from the utilty closet in the corner.

“Tranq him,” Aleta said, tossing the towel for the garbage chute. This time, no one argued – except Yondu, but Aleta had already decided that the boy’s opinion counted for less than her lowliest bilge-scrubber.

He’d said it himself, after all. He weren’t no Ravager.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kraglin will be along very soon, to complicate matters further! ;) Comments/kudos = love.


	4. it's been so long

She commed Stakar that night cycle. As calculated, enough time had passed for him to get suitably panic-stricken. He answered on the third try – unprecedented; the man never let a ring go through to answer-comm.

“Yes?” he snapped. His scowl crumpled on seeing who it was. “Oh. I’m sorry – it’s. It’s been a long day.”

Aleta accepted the apology with magnanimous grace. “Mm-hm."

Stakar propped his forehead on his knuckles. “You first.”

“Nah. After you.”

“If you insist. You’re definitely going to laugh at me, though.”

Aleta fought not to smile. “Am I?”

“Oh, yes. You see, I may have possibly…” His voice dipped; he checked his peripheries for eavesdroppers. “Lost Yondu.”

Aleta tucked up in her antigrav hammock, head pillowed on her curved arm. The ship rocked and groaned, yawing around asteroids too large to crush. Her hammock kept her in gyroscopic inertia, a cocoon soft as spider silk. Fitting, for a woman of her reputation. “No! How?”

“I don’t _know._ ” Stakar, unsurprisingly, remained at his desk. Datapads were stacked on all sides, arranged in neat towers according to client, price, and the potential losses incurred to his crew.

Shifts operated different on each ship. Aleta and Luta worked opposite cycles, one napping while the other manned the Bridge. Stakar had an entire roster of able staff to support him, but he still never looked like he got enough sleep.

“He must’ve found another hole. I’ve searched the entire ship – Martinex too. Knocking on the walls, calling his name. No sound or sign of him.” He leant closer to the camera. His miniature holoographic rendition fishbowled, eyes bulging out of his face like it had been squeezed. “I’ve put some food outside every vent duct aboard. I’m damn near ready to employ a Ravager to stand over each one with a net.”

Aleta hummed, playing with a frayed lock of hair. She plaited it and twisted it, rubbing the ragged ends to felt. “He ain’t what you expected?”

“A very astute observation. You know, when he started screaming at us, back when we fished him out of that dank, death-stinking pit? I thought he was delirious. Terrified kid, y’know? He’d been living with corpses for company so long, I thought he’d gone mad.”

Aleta yawned then sniffed, getting a blowback of her own stinky breath. Might have to crunch a floss-capsule before she shut her eyes; Yondu’s dentistry had reminded her of the importance of hygiene. “He ain’t mad."

Stakar nodded. “That he most certainly is not. He’s just…”

“Different.”

“That's one word for it _._ One thing's for sure - he needs all the help he can get.”

Aleta slapped blindly at her bedside table for her floss-dispenser. “He’ll get it. After he shakes off the tranq.”

“Good. I’m glad – I. What?”

 _Click_. A tiny white bead rolled out, caught in her cupped palm. She gave it a thorough tenderizing with her molars, and swept the paste around her teeth with her tongue, before swallowing it dry, along with any stray scraps of her dinner. “He’s on the _Arachna,_ Stakar. Snuck onto my ship – tried to hijack it, if you’d believe that.”

Stakar looked horrified. Then, grudgingly, impressed. “He did?”

“Gun to my head and everything.”

“And he’s still alive?”

Aleta snickered. “Plus a few scrapes.” She rolled her eyes the terse pinch of his lips. “Oh, lighten up. No permanent damage. What’s a cold-clock between friends?”

Stakar’s constipation only got stodgier, judging by his expression. “You could’ve rendered him a vegetable.”

“Done us all a favor, you mean. At least that way, he’d stop trying to gnaw off the limbs of anyone trying to help him.”

Stakar’s brow furrowed like a fresh-plowed field. “He bit off someone’s _arm_?”

“Attempted.” Minor exaggeration – the tendrils on Janyi’s head were more like whiskers. She still didn’t appreciate them being chewed. “Look, Stakar. He’s a stubborn little shit. I can see why you like him so much. But if he says he don’t wanna be here, he means it, and unless you want me to knock him unconscious in between his therapy visits, I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep him on board.”

Stakar massaged the salt deposits around his temples. Aleta swore they gobbled more of his peppery hair every time she saw him. “Just get him to Krugarr at the week’s end, and I’m sure it’ll be fine. Aleta, I have to go and retrieve all those plates I left in the corridors. It’s a health and safety nightmare.”

“That’s the good thing about being off-record,” Aleta reminded him. “No health and safety to worry about.”

“Nevertheless. If Martinex shatters a toe, I’ll never hear the end of it. Goodnight, Aleta.”

“But wait, what’m I supposed to do when Yondu wa” – Stakar hung up. – “kes up. You bastard.”

So much for being done with his bullshit after the divorce. Some things never changed. The stars shone, the planets span, and Stakar Ogord left his ex-wife to wash his dirty laundry.

 

* * *

 

 

Next morning she rolled from her hammock, landing catlike on her feet (if that cat was seven centuries old, regretting performing a split-kick yesterday without first limbering up, and was in dire need of Caff). It took a few moments to remember what had transpired the previous cycle. She spent them smacking her lips to get the taste of floss from her mouth.

A pistol parting her hair. A boy in a vent. Teeth, yellow and brittle from a carnivorous diet and a lack of care.

_Yondu._

“Shit,” she muttered, and wriggled into her coat and boots, thumping her cabin's lock panel until it responded.

 

* * *

 

 

Yondu was awake, when she reached the medbay. That was a bonus. He also wasn't smashing his head against the pallet, chomping on any bits of Janyi, and (Aleta gave him a cursory check-over, just in case) he didn't appear to be stashing a scalpel ready to shank on the next person to approach. Unless it was tucked under his loincloth.

Even giving what'd already been snipped off him, that meant he was a brave man indeed.

“Morning,” said Aleta curtly, dragging over a chair (after nudging the snoring Mijo off it. The medic subsided into a pile of forest green leather and rather more eyeballs than Aleta was comfortable with, even when they were closed). “Not in a fighting mood today, huh?”

Yondu didn't focus on her. He blinked, eyelashes surprisingly long on a face that angular. Then, scowling, he rolled, langorous as a basking whale, to face the other way.

Aleta discreetly toed the blanket higher over his hip. The boy might have no qualms about nudity, but his loincloth had twisted in the night and she didn't want to know whether the navy shape on his asscheek was a birthmark or a brand.

“The customary way to greet your captain,” she said, feigning cheer where Yondu had none to offer, “is with chest thumps.”

Yondu sniffed. “You ain't my cap'n.”

Aleta clapped. “Ah! It speaks!”

It turned its head just far enough to assail her with a glare. Aleta offered her sweetest smile in return.

“So, are you ready for the tour?”

She could delegate. Luta would be turning in for her off-shifts soon, but there were other girls Aleta trusted with a job of this delicacy; ones who wouldn’t hiss and claw at the man in their midst, or try to nudge him into the airlock at the exact moment their elbow banged the ejector button.

But others were less amenable to their latest crewmate. It had been a month since the last Blooding; the Spider’s brood were hungering. Perhaps, for now at least, the safest place for Yondu was by her side.

Plus, Stakar had entrusted this to her personally. While Aleta didn't give two whits about his opinion or his damned _disappointment,_ she got a frisson of pride out of seeing a job through to its finish. Yondu would look splendid, trussed up in green leather with a flame patch over his bicep. They'd just have to feed him up a bit first.

“Want breakfast?” she asked, when her initial queston failed to get a response. Yondu, having slipped up once in his vow of silence, buttoned his lips. Or rather, he pinned them between his teeth and ran the serrated edge back and forth until the skin split like an overripe yaro fruit, and he had to suckle on his own dark blood.

Aleta flicked him on the shoulder bandage, earning a yelp. “You've lost enough of that.”

“No thanks to you,” Yondu muttered. Then he snapped his mouth shut and glared, like he was daring her to plant a fist in his face and make him uglier.

Shame. Aleta had yet to see him properly smile, but the brat's bone structure told him he'd have quite the charming little grin. Must’ve been a stunner, before he got left on that stars-damn ship to rot with the rest.

She rocked her chair up on its hind legs, sweeping her ratty hair off her face. "Y'ain't getting off this ship any time soon, and never without an escort. You might as well find out where the bogs are and such. I got a spare cabin, besides mine. Usually save it for rich hostages, of the sort that demand bed linens rather than shackles in the brig. But we don't get many of them this far from the Supermassive, so no roommate for you. Lucky li'l Ravager.”

“I'm not a Ravager,” said Yondu, for the _n_ th time. He didn't sound all that hopeful that she'd listen. And, after a token period of glowering at the far wall, once she stood up and sauntered for the door, he followed.

Aleta scooted the chair back besides Mijo, who looped an arm around it and started drooling. The eyeball on the back of her hand blinked slowly opened, filmy with sleep. It rolled between the two of them: the tough little blade of a captain and the thin blue boy by her side.

Then it slid resolutely shut. Wise woman.

“First stop’s bog block,” said Aleta, taking stock of Yondu's bow-legged walk and none-too-subtle squirms. “Then I'll show you your new home.”

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yondu took to the cabin as Aleta expected. Poorly.

“This ain't right,” he said, standing on the threshold as if a forcefield blocked his path. He pointed to his bunk, all made up nicely with a thermoregulation blanket and minimal bed bugs. “I ain't allowed to sleep with no one. Not without Master's permission.”

Flarking great. Aleta had neither the patience nor the temperament to deal with this, not before her first caff-mug of the day.

However, she did have experience. More than she cared to admit. Women didn't join the Spider's clan unless they had something to prove. And while gender didn't conform to binary rules – and sex itself didn't conform to inward and outwards-facing genitalia, or even genitalia that was recognizable _as_ genitalia to all but the most discerning eyes – there were certain Intergalactic Standards that held.

It you had penetrable bits and a hard life, at some point somebody was gonna stick something in them.

That was why Aleta started the Blooding. She never expected it to continue centuries later. But that was hardly her fault. So long as men kept being pigs, she would slaughter them in kind.

However, her clan might’ve gotten too dependant on it, as of late. The girls were overdue a feast. With that in mind, Aleta set the lock panel on the door to her and Yondu's biosignatures alone, and rigged it to alert her should it be tampered with. Only those who deserved it would be Blooded, but a woman might forget that law long enough to cause damage.

“I ain't looking to sleep with you,” she said, keeping her voice level. “Not for sex. Warmth maybe – if the engine has a blow-out, or the heat guages malfunction. Then we can cosy up like pillbugs. But I don't like forcing people, personally.”

Yondu looked at her like she was stupid. “Ya can't _force_ a slave.”

“Oh yeah?” Aleta should stop probing – quit while she was ahead. She _didn't want to know._ And yet. It would bore away at her if not, the cavity beneath a stinking tooth that you couldn't stop poking with your tongue. “What if I wanted to fuck, huh? What then?”

Yondu laughed – actually laughed. A nasty little crack of a sound, but a laugh nevertheless. “You'd be damaging my master's property,” he said loftily. “Then he wouldn't just kill ya, thief. He'd torture you first. Snap your back. Fuck your children _._ ”

Lovely. Lucky her children were dead.

“You don't like the bed, you can sleep on the floor. Next up: mess hall. I need more caff.”

 

* * *

 

 

The hangar was the last stop on their journey. Yondu took it in: the sweeping expanse of the holo-field, which nevertheless only showed a tiny view-hole snippet of space. The ships hung in uniform columns and rows, dangling upside-down from gantries arranged according to rank and size. One-man engineer pods pootled along the rows, engines sputtering fumes.

If you looked down, the floor dropped away, nothing between the hulls of the city-sized galleon but engineer craft and empty M-ships. In this cavernous trench, the bulk of the Spider's armada rested. Aleta's ships weren't painted custom; she kept them a uniform black, a swarm of bats that scrambled and swooped at her command. It must look very easy, to an untrained eye, for one to slip from formation, be lost completely.

Of course, in actuality nothing was so simple. Aleta tracked all her ships with great impunity. The message, scrawled in the gizzards of the last girl fool enough to rob her, was clear: if you wanted to desert, you did so while planetside, and you sure as hell didn't take an M-ship with you.

She dropped a kindly hand on Yondu's shoulder. “You even think about it? I hunt you down.”

His clavicle flexed against her palm as he drew a sharp breath. Aleta had been sure to include the brig on her tour, and the galley, where the remains of the last victims of the Blooding hung from gory hooks.

“Good thing I ain't thinkin' shit."

Aleta smiled. “That's the spirit."

 

* * *

 

 

The week passed surprisingly fast. If Yondu wasn't on the Bridge or boredly trailing around after Luta or Aleta on engine inspection, he was either curled up on his favorite patch of floor in his cabin (he refused to contemplate the bed, but a heated pipe ran under the metal plating, and he had snaffled a pillow, so it wasn't _all_ that terrible) or in the observation nodule, watching stars flit through hyperspace. Light smeared behind them in greasy streaks, like sewage from the back of a primitive spacecraft.

“Beautiful, huh.”

Yondu jumped, bounding to attention before remembering where he was and who she was, and precisely how little esteem he held her in. He slumped slowly, shoulders gradually losing their tension.

“I were just thinkin' how far away my master must be now.”

His voice sounded accusative. Aleta was tired of it.

“Look kid,” she said, crossing from her casual lean on the doorframe to posture up close and personal. “If your master got out of that hell-hole alive – which I highly doubt – flying back for you would be suicide. If he's sensible, he'll give you up for dead and start a new life.”

_Presuming he ever saw you as more than a disposable fucktoy in the first place._

Most likely, the noble peeled himself from the escape pod, brushed himself off, and spared the lost slaves a shrug before zooming off to conquer the next planet on his hitlist and find some other pretty blue boy to fit his cock. But Yondu wouldn’t appreciate that. Best keep her thoughts to herself.

If Aleta wanted to keep him around – and she _did,_ because you couldn’t help but look at something with that much fiery potential and _not_ want to watch it flourish – she had to phrase this differently. Not a lie. More an… evasion.

“If he's out there, somewhere, best chance you've got to find him is to stay alive. Which means you’re stuck with us, kiddo. You get food, board, entertainment -”

If the Bloodings could be called that. Luta called on her yesterday to decree whether or not the boy would be involved, or even allowed to act witness. Aleta had yet to decide.

“Ain't gonna find such a sweet deal anywhere else,” she finished, watching the starlight fizzle into infinity. “You'll stick around, if you know what's good for you. Who knows – your path might be fated to cross with that master of yours again. But it ain't gonna be while you're stuck on that death-ship in the middle of the Galleons' Graveyard. I know that much.”

Yondu's lips slid over his bared teeth; his jaw cranked gradually closed. His volley of denials and cusses failed to launch.

“You mean that?” he asked softly, and Aleta hated the tremble in his voice. “That I might see him again, if I stay with ya?”

A noose knotted Aleta's guts.

Yeah, kid. Might even see what info I can pull to track him – I got contacts in the Kree Empire, and -"

Skinny arms closed on her waist.

Yondu's head bonked under her chin. His stale breath broke over her jacket zipper in rapid, trembling gusts. He was as ill-practised as she was; his shoulders formed sharp peaks, tense enough to jitter.

“Thank you,” he whispered, as she awkwardly patted his back. She’d sworn to feed him up, scrounging extra calories wherever she could. But rations were low ship-wide, and there were already too many grumbles among the girls for Aleta to show favoritism. They'd have to wait for the Blooding before their larder bulged again. “Thank you, cap'n. Thank you for takin’ me back to my master.”

Aleta sneered at her reflection. She extracted herself from Yondu's grip. Wrongness itched her fingers, like sand caught in the joints of her gauntlets.

 _We'll be in Krugarr's space soon,_ she told herself. _He'll figure this out._

 

 

* * *

 

 

Krugarr disagreed.

 _You can't_ _possibly_ _expect the boy to join your ghastly ceremonies,_  he said. Or rather, his hands did. They fluttered midair, their points occasionally augmented by the holograms hovering behind him, generated from a glittering tapestry of liquid-light.

Aleta supplied the voice in her own head, plummy accent and all. She crossed her arms. "And why not?"

_He's just a child!_

Krugarr wasn't going to let her sit in on the therapy session. Claimed it would be ‘intrusive’ – as though that had ever bothered her in the past.

But truth be told, she didn’t want to eavesdrop. If Krugarr’s mind-bending Escher-twist of a ship never agreed with her stomach, his therapy methods were guaranteed to leave her nauseous.

Aleta disliked his magic. The Hawk God’s power was less explicable still, but she didn’t _try_ to figure that out. She didn’t need to. She just utilized it as necessary, packed it away again afterwards, and tried her damned best to pretend she wasn’t tempted by Krugarr’s offers of evanescence, of leaving the pain of her children far behind her. Or, for that matter, more risky methods.

Sugary smoke curling from a twist of _mora_ root.

The glint of hypo needles tucked up sleeves.

The track marks she sometimes spotted on her girls’ inner arms, which won them a trip to Janyi and a very stern talking-to.

No. She wouldn’t be like Stakar. She wouldn’t erase the pain of their passing, like she’d painted over the name of her galleon when she first acquired it, anointing the steel with the spray-on stencil _Arachna_ and a scuttling spider below.

Aleta was not and never would be so _weak_. Grief hurt, but it was still _hers._ Her lost little ones, her nightmares, her sorrow. She wouldn't relinquish it without a fight.

“He's twenty,” she pointed out.

All four of Krugar's hands wrung, scaly and holographic alike. They restarted their flurry before she considered the argument won:

_His species ages faster than the galactic norm! He may have the physical appearance of a twenty-year-old, but by my estimation, he can only have been alive for ten Galactic Standards -_

Huh. Age enumeration was a tricky subject, considering the smorgasbord of species the galaxy had on offer. Some lasted centuries (especially when they had their lifespan extended by helpful Hawk Gods). In contrast, others lingered at the bottoms of swamps for decades, then shed their larval pods and crawled forth to mate and die in a single day.

Every Empire, every civilization, had its own ways of determining who was and wasn’t an adult. Xandarians aged people according to how many Galactic Standards they'd survived. The Kree calculated results according to physical appearance. Simple as that.

Some species just withered away faster than others. It was nothing to get upset about, regardless of what played behind Aleta’s eyelids. (A sunken, haggard face, skin sagging like baggy elastic. Dust sifting through her fingers, moistened by her tears. The lingering whisper of _mommy.)_

Yondu leaned towards her. “What's fishdude sayin'?”

Krugarr sighed. He sketched a selection of shapes with his bony fingers. The webs between stretched translucent, casting distorted shadow puppets against the far wall.

“That you're small for your age,” Aleta lied. “He wants to make sure we're feeding you. Told him I’ll up your rations, but we gotta do a Blooding first.”

Yondu looked a trifle concerned. “I can't get fat! Master won’t like it if I’m fat.”

“Master can go fuck hims --” Krugarr's gills flapped in the Lem version of a cough. Aleta tried again. “Our larders are nearly empty. The Blooding will fill them up.”

“Whas this Blooding crap? Heard you an' Luta talkin' bout it other night – an' some of the other chicks on yer ship keep sayin' it when they look at me.”

Well, that was cause for concern. All the more reason to bring the kid. Nothing forged bonds faster than waiting in tenuous silence for the hand on your thigh that implicated the deaths of every man aboard.

“It's a ritual,” said Aleta, glaring at Krugarr to keep his mouth shut – kinda redundant, in hindsight. “Been doing it since long before I launched my own galleon, back when I ran a squad under Stakar.”

Krugarr painted chiding swirls mid-air. _We were wilder then. More bloodthirsty. The rest of us have grown up._

Aleta bared her teeth, but Yondu piped up before she got the chance to argue:

“So I can join in, right?” He frowned, as if struck by a sudden thought. “Are slaves allowed?”

Krugarr shaped the symbols for _you, property,_ and _not,_ and turned expectantly on Aleta. She kept mum. Seemed the only word on the subject Yondu was willing to believe came from his Master – he laughed in her face, last time she told him he was free.

“Yeah,” she said. “You're invited.”

Krugarr's head shaking was blithely ignored.

She couldn't offer the boy much in the way of reparation for what his Master put him through. Who knew? Perhaps a Blooding game might help teach him his right from wrong; show him which men deserved murder and which a chance at redemption.

In any case, her crew needed a scapegoat. She'd rather it was some nameless ice-trawler than Yondu.

Aleta nudged Yondu to take his tentative steps into Krugarr’s labyrinth. Fractals twirled on holographic plinths. The corridors were lined with jewel-set mandalas that only got more complex the more you tried to puzzle them out. Yondu tiptoed like he was scared the floor would give way beneath his feet.

Aleta left him to it. She had other matters more deserving of her attention. With Krugarr covering babysitting, she and Luta could finally get together over a flagon of moonshine and scour the trade maps for a suitable victim.

Time for the Spider to spin webs.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you all so much for reading - I love every comment and kudos! Kraglin arrives next chapter ;)**


	5. feel my blood enraged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PLEASE CHECK TAGS AND THE NEW RATING. This fic is now M-rated, as this chapter contains attempted rape that ends in death. Lots of death. Aleta and her girls arguably have a little too much fun - YMMV. Also - we now have Kraglin!**

They found prey three decacycles later.

Ice frigate. Nothing spectacular. Aleta could piece together the crew’s sordid origin story from a glance.

The vessel, older than the _Arachna_ and crusted with lichen, was populated by men looking to make profit, out beyond where comets were subject to Empire tariffs. Men on the lam; men who didn't want to be found.

But found they had been. Poor souls. Better the law catch up with them than the Spider.

 

* * *

 

 

The _Arachna_ chugged through the asteroid field, shields revved to maximum. They repulsed the rocks, bouncing them away. Stay too long in a field, and hostile scanners noted the suspiciously empty zone from which asteroids were flying – a surefire sign of a lurking ship.

But Ravagers were conmen, and conmen knew how to distract people. So long as the ice frigate's navs focused on the trawler puttering across their path, engines waning, glow fading from their turbo-thrusters, they wouldn't pay any heed to the predator skullking on the periphary of their sensor arrays.

Distress beacons were commonplace in the Black. Most went ignored. If theirs went this route, the _Arachna_ would swallow the ice frigate fast and meticulous, chomping through her girders, wrenching her apart, spilling her crew through the Black as frost-glittering corpses.

It was when the frigate responded to the video – sent by Elisi, one of their youngest, with a face as-of-yet unscarred by the tribulations of Outer Rim life – that things got interesting.

 

* * *

 

 

“So yer tellin' me,” whispered Yondu, huddled beside Aleta on the chilly floorplates. “All we gotta do is lie here an’ look pretty?”

 _Sure you’ve had plenty of experience of that._ Aleta nodded. “They'll handle the rest. Aw hell – come here. Your make up's smudged. You been rubbing your eyes again?”

“The Kree stuff don't smudge.” Yondu shuffled defensively to face her, shutting his painted lashes and tipping his face into what meager light the low-powered solars provided. Aleta uncorked her bottle, pouring a dram of the kohl onto her finger before applying it to Yondu's upper and lower lids. “Don't _itch_ either. Y'all don't got holographic face packs out here?”

“Waste of power.” This far between stars, their solar harvesters didn’t have much of a chance to recharge. The Spider's girls horded energy for space-jumps, not vanity.

Aleta uncorked the next phial. _Stardust,_ read the peeling, sun-bleached label. She pinched glitter to sprinkle over Yondu's cheekbones. The remainder crackled under her nails, until she licked it loose.

Wasn't much good trying to make him look like a girl, but he had a cute little nose and lashes that curled nicely when thickened with mascara. At a glance, he could pass for one of the painted twinks who cavorted around uppercrust parties in the Nestar system.

“Where’d you get all this stuff anyway?” Yondu wanted to know.

“Cruisers.” Aleta twisted the stopper back into the phial. They’d scattered snapped plastic cocktail flutes and huffer needles around them, offset by splashes of liquor, The relics of a party – so their boarders would assume. “A few of them still head out this way.”

“Izzat where this crap comes from too?” Yondu examined the gold chains draped around his neck. Luta festooned him liberally; the boy clanked when he breathed. Still, Aleta thought, pursing thoughtful lips at him as she turned his face left to right, then returned with the contents of a third pot to add a touch of shine to his cracked lips. Nothing attracted scum better than glint, smooth flesh and smiles.

Yondu tried to lick the glossy off, like he'd done with the first lot. Aleta squashing his cheeks together.

“What you doing, boy?”

“Sticky an' weird,” Yondu burbled, words crushed out by the pressure from her nails. No gauntlets – not today. "Don't like it."

"You don't gotta like it. Just deal with it - until I give the signal, yeah?"

"What's the signal."

Aleta smirked. "Oh, you'll know it."

She'd stashed her compact pistol under her skirt, nestled up close to her cunt. Yondu wasn't yet trusted with firearms, but they'd given him a knife, attached to the inside of his new gold thigh ring, hidden under the loincloth, and he claimed that he knew how to use it.

He’d had three sessions with Krugarr thus far. He was rapidly approaching the anniversary of his first month as a Ravager – although he still wouldn't let her call him one to his face.

Aleta had actually wrestled him into leathers last week. The boy stood awkwardly, constantly readjusting, discomforted by the scrape of seams over skin. But he'd stopped shedding layers all over the ship, probably when he realized that on a galleon that big and drafty, he needed all the cover-up he could get.

For the sake of this mission though, the loincloth returned. With a careful application of eyeliner and smoky shadow, the kid looked good enough to eat. His rotten teeth had been pulled, replaced for this mission with shining, precious gold. Quite the little charmer - he fit right in.

They were all done up in their finest: shabby ball gowns from five seasons ago, painted faces, clumsily curled hair. To a Xandarian delegate they'd look like clowns, children in women's bodies who'd been splashing about in their mothers' make up drawers. But to miner folk, they'd look stunning. An snatch of glitz and grandeur. Poor peppy rich kids, who, having made a circuit of the tourist hubs at the far-end of Xandarian space, had been too blotto to watch the nav systems as they drifted out to No Man's Space.

Yondu rubbed his lips together. “Can't whistle like this. S'too... gummy.”

“Why'd you need to whistle?”

Yondu glanced away. “Never mind.”

The judder ran through them, metal shivering underfoot. “Locked on,” Luta murmured. Being of a beefy nature, she didn't fit the look of Aleta's selected crew. She would slip behind the smuggler panels when the ice miners boarded, along with the back-up girls: the scarred, the fat, the tentacular; those who wanted to be a part of the Blooding, but didn’t qualify by merit of allure alone.

Aleta squeezed Yondu's shoulder. “Ready?”

Yondu nodded. Aleta's own masked visage grinned back at her, distorted by the curve of mirrored walls.

“Good.”

Their companions consisted of Elisi, a tiny half-Kymellian; Marsy, a buxom Xandarian; and Horla, lissom and tall, a beautiful mongrel who'd run from the A'ashfraxi quadrangle after the Kylntar infestation. She kept scowling at Yondu.

Aleta slung an arm over his shoulders, just in case.

“Look at us, all irresistible. Chin up, girls. We feast tonight.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

There was a time, when she first staged a Blooding, when she hoped the crews wouldn't fall for the bait. But as time passed and fewer and fewer men proved themselves worthy of life, she began to yearn for it – even enjoy it, in a sick sort of way.

The slide of a hand up her bare thigh. The fear in his eyes when he brushed her pistol.

The soft, squelching give of his throat around her teeth.

 _We give 'em what they deserve,_ she told her girls as they crouched around her, bloodthirsty and cold. _They think they can take what they want from us? We prove them wrong._

And so she shot a dozy smile at the first miner to crack the door and shine his torch into the spacious compartment, waggled her fingers, and pretended to faint.

Rigs like this housed bad men, those who'd evaded capture by the Nova corps and made their way into unaffiliated space. The sort of men who, upon encountering a boat full of pretty petite partygoers, already presumed dead by all who cared for them, wouldn't think twice about taking advantage.

They trod among them, heavy mag-boots locking and clicking to the floor.

“I don't like this.”

Aleta cracked an eye. Rare, for any among the pack to dispute their leader.

The man was nothing special. He looked five years Yondu’s senior, a few years shy of thirty and thin as a rail.

Yondu’s lifespan – so short, so fleeting, even compared to the majority of species in this quadrant – made Aleta’s heart hurt and her memories broil. She concentrated on other things.

The man wrung his hands – long and pale as the rest of him, their undersides coarse from manual labor. Tattoos scrawled across the tendon in his neck, spacer con-lang. They  ticked in time with his pulse. His limbs had that elongated look that came from spending too much time in microgravity.

“You ain't heard of the Spider, boss? There's stories, y'know – ships like this in the black, full o’pretty women -”

The captain heaved Elisi up. He groped her supple little breasts, then brushed between her legs. He missed the gun – or she twisted, just subtly, so his fingers grazed on by.

Dropping her, he moved to Yondu. Watching him touch the kid sent Aleta's bile ducts into overdrive. But he played his part perfectly, lolling like he'd been told, eyes half-lidded and breath soft. The captain looked him over, holding him up by the shoulders as Yondu let his knees crumple inwards, jewellery tinkling off his bare, thin chest.

Captain squeezed his ass, licked his lips, moved on. “The Spider don't let men aboard her boats."

Aleta listened out of pragmatism as well as curiosity. It never hurt to keep a tap on rumors.

Yondu subsided back to the floor, exhaling slow and steady. Aleta recalled how he’d whinged about his master not allowing others to fuck him. She resolved to buy the kid a hooker-bot at the next port. He deserved one damn sexual experience where he called the shots.

The captain stepped over him, onto the next. He dealt Marsy a kick; she rolled with it, loose as a doll. “Lookit 'em – these brats have been snortin' so much huffer they don't know their own names, let alone how far they are from home.”

On cue, Marsy laughed. It was a high-pitched and fluting sound, eerie enough to have some of the men shivering. Aleta grimaced, wishing she’d tone it down.

She needn’t have worried. Marsy’s breasts heaved against their shimmery, gold satin cladding. They might as well have been starlight in the darkness. The other men, less tentative now their captain had made the first move, padded through the airlock seal and onto the foreign ship.

“Ain't fucked nothin' but my hand in a year,” said one wistfully. His shadow fell over the sprawled Horla, who'd arranged her toga-like robe to simultaneously cover as little skin and as many weapons as possible.

The captain nodded. “It's the same for all of us.” He approached Aleta, furthest back in the shuttle. “All missin' the touch of a woman's flesh. Man’s got needs, Obfonteri. You must be wanting too, I’d wager. All them porn holovids of yours can’t match up to the real thing.”

Hands, men's hands. They heaved her up by her hair.

Aleta didn't react to the pain in her scalp. She let her glossy lips part, drool slickening one corner of her mouth. She giggled when the captain draped her across his arms like a spoil of war.

“C'mon then. Pick yer ladies.” He shot a scathing look at his subordinate. “Obfonteri can fuck the boy, if he's such a fuckin' wetnose. He’s got a nice lil’ ass.”

Another miner barged forwards, wiping under his slack jaw. “N-naw,” he argued, before Obfonteri could grimace and shy away. “I want that one! I like 'em blue -”

His neighbor elbowed him. “Can always take turns. Ain't enough for all of us – someone's gonna have to take sloppy seconds.”

“Fine by me.”

“Yeah! I wanna go with the one with the big tits and the dark-haired chick boss's got.”

“Hell no,” grunted the captain. He petted the hair back from Aleta's face. The stink of the caustics they used to strip impurities from the ice-water clung to his palms. It made Aleta's nose twitch, but she forced herself to nuzzle into it, purring kittenish-soft. “I ain't sharin' your diseases. Look, these kids've most likely burnt through their food stock and are tryin' to overdose to get it all over with. We're just gonna have some fun, then help 'em on their way. Practically charity.”

Aleta had heard all manner of justifications for this act. It never ceased to amaze her how quick the men were to agree.

Except, oddly, Obfonteri.

“C'mon now,” he said, around the ball in his throat. “Y'ain't really gonna... Boss, these ain't hooker-bots. They're sapients, like you an’ me.”

“I ain't blind,” growled the captain. “I know what I'm about. Either fuck the blue boy before Ashkr sticks his cock in him, or go cry somewhere else.”

Obfonteri dithered. Aleta couldn't see much of him; she had to keep her eyes unfocused, moved as the captain wanted her, like a cold china doll. What glimpses she caught didn't impress her. The kid couldn't fight all of them, not on his own. Most likely they'd shank him, toss him out the airlock, and let him watch the orgy during those ten frigid seconds before ice stars obscured his vision and he suffocated in silence.

Obfonteri must realize it. His thin shoulders slumped. “I ain't watchin' this. Yer sick, all of you. Fuckin' sick.”

He pushed through the crowd and headed for the door. They let him go. A few bumped his scrawny shoulders, barging him between them like a ball in a casino machine. He bore the buffets and the bruises in silence.

Poor kid. Shame his crew sealed his death warrant.

Aleta licked her teeth. Her lipstick had smeared. A chalky taste, a greasy consistency, pasted over her incisors.

“You're beautiful,” the captain told her. He parted her quivering thighs – anticipation, not fear.

Then he stroked the barrel of her gun.

His forehead crinkled. “What the –“

He didn’t manage another word. Aleta chomped it right out of him, as she surged to sink her teeth into his neck.

Everything happened quickly, after that.

“Suckers,” chortled Luta, booting the smuggler panel off at the hinges. The other Ravager girls took the screams as their cue, spilling into the ship like a hungry swarm of locusts, a biblical plague from one of those Outer Rim moon cults, who glutted themselves on lifeblood and worshipped a bellicose god.

Aleta spared a moment to groan at the discarded panel. She'd have Luta solder it back on later. For now? For now, the Spider fed.

The captain clapped his hands over the hole in his trachea. He dropped her. She twisted like a feline; hit the floor in a nimble crouch.

The pressure from his fingers wasn't enough – blood gushed like a geyser. His eyes rolled back and his dripping hands dropped, the rest of him swiftly following.

Aleta kicked off her stilettos. She flipped one in her hand, and introduced the shank to the eardrum of the next guy along.

“Girls! Leave no man alive!”

Horla looked rather too enthusiastic. Aleta clarified: 

“ _Except_ Yondu."

The element of surprise wore off fast. These men were marauders as much as they were miners, and every other vessel you met this far from the patrolled starways was liable to be pirates. What happened out here stayed out here. They knew there was no help coming, no succour from a passing craft. Certainly, there would be no mercy from the Spider and her queens.

Aleta spotted Yondu ramming his knife to the hilt under the chin of the man who'd claimed first dibs on his netherbits. He grinned as the blood splattered around him like gray-blue rain.

That bastard fell, and the next and the next and the next. Aleta strode across the carpet of cadavers, their blood painting her bare, pale feet. She ran down her mental checklist, toeing the men's slack faces from side to side, until she realized who was missing.

“Split up,” she snarled. “The rat won't have run far.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Obfonteri?” Those four syllables, each sung at a different tone, echoed around the ship's hollowed superstructure.

Water was a precious resource, and mining a lucrative trade. Still, things went amiss, as things always did. This mining rig had never gotten past the construction stage. Either that or – more likely – they’d run into debt and had to liquidate the majority of their interior plating for scrap.

The ship was a donut shell, its interior entirely hollow. Gantries and walkways crisscrossed the space; the crew had bedded down on wire platforms, bedding piled together to form a filthy, tattered nest. The weightiest things on board were the hydraulics used to snare comets and drag them into the central hole, where the crew could don space suits and saw off ginormous chunks to be melted into storage tanks until they docked on Knowhere.

“Obfonteri!” Aleta called. “Obfonteri, where _are_ you?”

Most of the girls had stayed behind, to snap over which of them got to suck the marrow from the menfolk’s bones. The majority of the meat would’ve been stripped by now, butchered expertly from the carcass, the offal pulled out and set aside, no part wasted.

Now, if only Obfonteri would join his crew.

“Oh, Obfonteri... Why don’t you come out? Ain’t you never been kissed by a Spider?”

Yondu loped beside her. “Why we chasing him?” he whispered. “He tried to stop 'em, didn't he?”

 _Men._ Typical.

“He looked the other way. He didn't step in; he deserves death.”

Yondu scanned between the close-placed slats under their feet, searching for movement on the walkways below. “If he’d stepped in, he'd be dead.”

Marsy gnashed her teeth. “Coulda saved us the effort!”

“Shut up,” growled Horla. “Heard somethin', I did.”

They fanned out. Yondu was least accustomed to working in a group. How strange it must be, to go from watching his own back, trusting no one; to acting as part of a ship, part of a crew? To go from eating your friends out of necessity, to eating evil men no one would miss?

Aleta presumed he and Krugarr chewed on that cud during their meetings. Yondu never brought it up with her, and she never asked.

“Hey,” she said. “Does anyone smell rat?”

“I’ve activated the security cameras,” said Luta into her earpiece. “He's headed for the stern. There must be escape pods, bored into the hull.”

He'd die out there – dehydration, unless he'd shoved enough ice-lick in his suit pockets to keep him alive until he burnt through his breathable air. However, if he made it to the asteroid belt without the _Arachna_ scooping him up, they'd lose his body. An escape pod was too small to be picked up by the scanners.

“Which route?”

“Below. I can get you a chute number –“

Loud whoops, ululating war cries. Their circle broke from formation, sprinting for the ladder shaft. Aleta peered below, searching for the source of the commotion.

There. Far, far below. Down on the lowest ramp, amid the tar and cobwebs and dirty ice-water that filled this ship’s slopping bilges, something moved. A thin man, shaking from leftover adrenaline, fleeing the Spider's Feast.

“Never mind. I got a visual. Anyone have a grapple?”

“Don't bother.”

Yondu hadn’t followed the others. He backed up. He backed up very significantly. Even threw in a little shooing motion, to get her out the way.

Aleta held her ground. “The hell you thinking, boy?”

“You know what race I am?”

“Cen-tor-ee-ahn?” So claimed the medical data. Aleta had assumed Kree to begin with, but she thought it prudent not to mention that. Yondu nodded, showing off his new ivories – or 'metallies', would be more precise.

“And Centaurians are tree dwellers.” He gestured at the walkways, which merged and split like branches in a jungle. “I'm built for this shit.”

Horla, last down the ladder, paused long enough to spit. “He just wants to help him escape! He ain't one of us!”

Aleta span on her with a hiss. “He took part in the Blooding! He's one of us whether he likes it or not.”

Horla tempered her sneer. The girl had ambition, but she wasn't willing to disobey a direct order – Aleta wouldn't have trusted her on this mission otherwise.

Yondu scoffed. “I ain't here forever. I'm with you till I find my master. Remember?”

It might just be Aleta's imagination, but that question sounded a little self-directed.

“Be careful,” she said, as he mounted the railing, the steel digging into the balls of his bare feet. Then, before that could be construed as softness: “If you miss, we ain't scraping up your splat-mark and giving you a Ravager funeral. We’ll leave you for the rats.”

Yondu smirked. His make-up smudged like camo-paint. He'd rubbed the gloss from his lips, a stripe of which now accentuated his left cheekbone. His eyes were more volcanic than 'smoky', and he'd lost an earring somewhere in the scuffle – yanked out, leaving a dripping slit at the bottom of his lobe.

“Good thing I ain't a Ravager,” he told her, and backflipped off the ledge and into the dark.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you so much to everyone who leaves comments and kudos! <3**


	6. it's just the fear of losing you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **A quickie!**

“You're sure about this,” Luta rumbled in Aleta's ear when she first agreed to Yondu's tenancy on the  _Arachna_. “A man living among us? As one of us?”

Aleta replied “Yes,” because what other choice was there? Yondu needed her. He needed  _something._

Aleta wasn't much, but the brat had low standards. It took the bare minimum – bed, board, clothes – to feel like she was performing some great act of charity. She got all the gratification with none of the work.

In short, he was the perfect kid for a crappy parent.

Aleta hadn’t had the chance to do right by her kids first time around. Yondu wasn’t hers by blood – and he irritated her more than he made her heart flush fond, or whatever other sappy sentiments one’s progeny were supposed to invoke. But he was there and she was there, and so they made do.

Yondu pottered after her as she went on her daily stomp about the ship: checking stocks, debriefing those who’d returned from solo missions, ensuring their M-ships were refuelled and their holds lightened before she banished them back into the black.

Sometimes, if Luta or Janyi was free – the doctor might hold grudges, but as a pacifist she as honor-sworn not to  _do_ anything about them, which made her the perfect babysitter – Yondu enjoyed an hour outside of Aleta’s supervision. He performed whatever menial task he was pointed to, and while he pulled faces, he never once complained.

Aleta supposed his master had a separate team of housekeepers. Probably personal chefs, pillow-plumpers, and ass-wipers too. Personal slaves were companions as much as they were concubines – to dress up and show off and (apparently) brainwash into loving you so they kept your secrets.

Yondu might actually have had a cushier life as a slave than as a Ravager, so long as he remained young, taut, pretty, and amenable to being used at his master’s whims. If it hadn’t been for the conscription, he’d have waxed and waned in his master’s bedroom, sent off to the recycling plant as soon as his flesh was no longer of interest.

Damn shame, in Aleta’s opinion. However, such was the way of the Kree.

A slave was property in a two-legged package. Once its master had no more use for it, it would be sold on or disposed of, mulched into food supplement to nourish the rest. No wonder Yondu batted no eyes at devouring his fellow slaves for survival, or watching a group of miners be diced into friable chunks. He just did as he was told, so long as he remained convinced of Aleta’s little white lie – that she would help him find his missing master.

Until now.

 

* * *

 

 

“No,” he said.

Aleta crooked her favorite eyebrow. “No?”

“I ain’t gonna kill him. He weren’t gonna hurt us – he just wanted to run.”

“He’s a coward then,” Aleta pointed out. “Better stew than crew.”

Yondu pinched Obfonteri’s underarm flab – what little of it he could gather – with a raised brow of his own. Point taken. Yondu was skinny, courtesy of two years subsisting on what meat he could glean from his dead brethren, but Obfonteri looked to be embarking on his own road to starvation.

Aleta stalked closer, scenting the air around Obfonteri’s whey-white face. “He stinks of piss.”

“That’s jus’ the bilges, ma’am.” His croak was barely above a whisper. “We got vacuum-bogs, but when those a-holes’re drunk, they just piss off the side.”

“’Those a-holes’, huh? You ain’t too fond of your crew?” She tapped him between the eyes with her pistol, ignoring Yondu’s scowl. “Sure didn’t come back for them.”

“I warned ‘em! An’, an’…” His hands sketched spidery shapes, long fingers flexing and curling, flexing and curling, like a supernova replayed on repeat.

“They deserved it,” he whispered. He met Aleta’s eyes for the first time. “Aint’ the first time they done that to a bunch of rich kids who got lost out here. They  _deserved_  it.”

Aleta tipped her head, hair spilling over her blood-spattered smile. “You didn’t stop ‘em then either, did you?”

Obfonteri shivered. “N-no ma’am. I’m, I’m sorry –“

“You don’t owe me shit. Save the apologies for when you see those other kids in the afterlife. I'm going to slit your throat and drop you in the sewer.”

The knobble in Obfonteri’s throat rose until he must be choking on it. “I didn’t have no choice! I can’t fight the whole fuckin’ crew – y’think I  _liked_ watchin’ what they was doin’ to those girls? Knowin’ I couldn’t do shit about it?”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo,” snarled Horla, but she shut up when Aleta glared.

“You could’ve left,” she said softly, scraping her gun over Obfonteri's stubble to rest under his little nub of a jaw. The barrel had cooled from the warmth of her groin, but it still smelt of her – girl-sweat and bloodlust.

Obfonteri’s nostrils flared, pupils pinpricked at the center of his huge gray eyes.

“Could’ve hopped ship next port, found yourself a decent gig. But you stayed, didn’t you? You stayed, because at the end of the day, easy cash means more.”

Obfonteri laughed: a dry crackle of sound. “There ain’t no good crews out here. Ain’t nothin’ but space and scum.”

“You got that right.”

The hand closed on her wrist before she could pull the trigger, blast Obfonteri’s weaselly face apart like an asteroid shredded by mine-drills.

“Don’t,” said Yondu.

Horla aimed a spit wad at his feet. “What’d I tell ya? He ain’t one of us.”

Aleta's finger wavered. She glanced at Yondu, along the length of his arm to the scar on his shoulder, the dripping gash in his earlobe, the blood-stained gold around his neck.

“Don't,” he said again. The paint around his eyes formed dark circles, dribbling down his cheeks, diluted in sweat.

Aleta licked the coppery crust under her lip, where one of the captain's lackeys got a lucky shot. The tooth smarted, but it didn’t wobble when she pushed at it with her tongue.

“Why the hell not?”

Yondu's grip held firm. “You only hurt them who hurt you, right? Or who woulda done, if you didn't kill 'em first. Thas' Code, ain't it?”

Horla's ribcage swelled around her snarl. “Don'tchu be talkin' Code, boy! You ain't no Ravager!”

“The Bloodings ain't part of the Code,” Aleta said. “Came up with them myself. Good stress-relief.”

Yondu nodded towards the airlock hatch, positioned high overhead, an abscess in the wall infected with blood. An arm sagged over it. Blood plipped from the longest finger, droplets falling down, down, all the way down, to plop in the stagnant pool below.

Each ripple was quickly swallowed by the congealing stew of ice run-off and sewage and, most likely, the bodies of those other girls Obfonteri mentioned. The stench was far from the thickest Aleta had sampled – thievery took you through many a septic pipe – but it brought a sheen to her eyes nevertheless.

“Ain't that enough of a de-stress for ya? Killin' all them men?”

Aleta's mouth curved down. “I didn't think  _you_ of all people would vouch for  _less_ violence.”

Yondu shrugged. “Jus' don't seem right, is all.” He stalked around Kraglin on the narrow walkway, admiring him from every angle. “He's all weedy an' pathetic an' shit. Ain't got no chance of fighting back.”

“Neither did the captain,” Aleta pointed out. “When I bit his throat out.”

Another gulp made the trek along Obfonteri's esophagus. His chin retreated back into his neck, as if trying to make itself a smaller target.

“The captain was an a-hole. He ain't.” And – as if things were that simple – Yondu tossed an arm over Obfonteri's bony shoulders and slouched besides him, louring enough for the both of them. "I say we keep him."

"You ain't captain."

"Nope. You are. I say we keep him. What do you say?"

“Easy,” hissed Horla. “Kill 'em both.”

Aleta's chuckle deepened, turned dangerous. “You don't tell me what to do.” But she directed the words at Horla, not Yondu. “Obfonteri,” she asked once the woman surrendered, breaking eye contact and scowling at her toes. “What's your first name?”

Yondu’s arm looked to be all that held Obfonteri aloft. “K-Kraglin, ma'am.”

“Don't call me ma'am.” Aleta turned, wishing for a leather coat to flare out behind her. She picked over the grilling on bare toes, one bloody stilletto dangling from her finger by the ankle strap. “Kid, you can call me captain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you so much to EVERY kudos-giver and reviewer. Y'all mean the world.**


	7. don't you know my name?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **OKAY so this is almost completely unedited. Sorry for any mistakes!**

Kraglin was a pilot. Or rather he had been, once upon a time, before the universe spat him out into No-Man’s Space.

He gave Aleta a potted history, mumbling most to the inside of his collar, while the girls conducted an efficient pat-down and filched every knife from the lining of his jumpsuit. Pretty average, as stories went.

He ran with the Nova corps for a decade. Came from money – nothing special, but more than what most space-trash dared dream of. _Stability._ He joined up soon as he was old enough to enlist, lured by action and adventure and all those other things they promised him on the advertisement holodex.

Where he wound up – ferrying supplies and ammo to the soldiers on the front lines – wasn’t the fun Boys' Own adventure he’d hoped for. Raised in three-quarter-G on an offworld hydroponics farm, his legs were too long to cram in the cockpits of the fighter crafts. If he ejected, he’d leave his kneecaps behind.

Cursed by his stature to a life of mediocrity, he put his head down and soldiered through his commission. But war was an ugly thing. There was no glory, no pride. All Kraglin got for his efforts – like so many other brats before him – was mud and scars and a lingering flinch whenever he heard the rattle of a rail gun.

A missile strike killed his squad during his second year of combat. He was the last flyer left, duty-bound to collect a bunch of infantryman off an overrun docking port, while dodging heavy gouts of anti-aircraft fire.

Suicide run, anyone would say. But Kraglin had his orders, and his general would rather see him die trying so they could brand him as a hero, write a nice eulogy and plaster his face over the recruitment posters in proud memory. An example to other boys like him.

Kraglin might be a coward, but he was no idiot. Those soldiers were dead either way.

Aleta saw the pragmatism behind it. Fall behind, get left behind – the way of pirates galaxy-wide.

But armies got tetchy when you didn’t die when you were told to. Kraglin couldn’t return to Xandarian territory – he’d be branded a traitor, sent to the Kyln if he was lucky. So he did what any sane person would do. He pawned his cruiser and his uniform to a Kree spy, making his desertion official. Then he hopped aboard the first outwards-bound frigate that would take him to No Man's Space.

 

* * *

 

 

Aleta held up her hand. The words puttered to a stop.

“I’ve heard enough,” she said. She relished Kraglin’s cringe, like he expected her to slash his throat if he dared breathe too loud. Aleta wasn’t one for reassurances. She let him believe what he wanted, like she let the rumors of the Spider gather in crannies of the galaxy like musty old cobwebs. “Yondu?”

Yondu glanced up. Perched on the inactive half of Luta’s monitor and avoiding her swats, he kicked his bare toes back and forth. They might have wrestled him into pants, but boots were a whole other hurdle. “Yeah?”

Aleta jerked her chin at Kraglin. “He’s with us until we return to Krugar’s territory. He sleeps in the brig till then; no contact.”

Yondu looked disappointed. It must be a novelty for him to have another man around.

Aleta took it in: the mutual slump of their shoulders, the glancing brush of their gaze. Propping one hand on each hip, she tipped her head back and projected her groan at the ceiling.

“ _Okay_. But he’s your responsibility, Yondu. He does anything stupid…” Like making a pass at one of the girls, or letting his eyes linger too long in the communal showers. “I ain’t taking responsibility. We’ll roast the both of you, side by side. Goddit?”

Kraglin made a strangled noise in the back of his throat that Aleta took for assent. Yondu just rolled his eyes.

“Whatever.” He grabbed a scrawny wrist and led the way, marching Kraglin off to repeat the same tour Aleta gave him not one Lunar before.

“Damn,” said Luta. “They grow up so fast, huh boss?”

Aleta watched the pair of them until she couldn't see them anymore. "Yeah," she said, softly. "They sure do."

 

* * *

 

 

“Um. What’re you doing?”

Aleta clamped her screwdriver between her teeth. She grunted around it, jamming the panel back into place, then – holding it with her other hand – extracted the metal bit and reconnected the seal, charging the electro-magnets until they hummed.

There. Tamper proof – unless you were strong enough to punch through the door and out the other side, which neither of the boys were.

“Fixing their panel.”

“Didn’t know it was broken.”

“Wasn’t until I started messing with it.”

“Ah.” Luta crouched beside her, head still bobbing a good foot above Aleta’s own. “Security measures?”

“Uh-huh.”

She'd locked them in. If the boys needed to piss before the automated opening time at the start of first-shift, they could put the waste hatch to use.

Kraglin at least had a biological advantage. His pants housed a handy aiming rod.

Yondu might have more difficulty, but Aleta hadn’t snooped enough at the handy diagrams included in his medical record to work out where his urethra was, or if he even had one at all. Not her business. He was a smart lad; he’d work it out.

If an engine blew in the night cycle, they’d be incinerated alive – but so would Aleta, in the cabin next door. They’d all go out together. Big, happy family.

 

* * *

 

 

The so-called 'security measures' kept the crew… Well, not _happy_. But Horla’s grumbles tailed off after the first week, after which point Kraglin had yet to dramatically force himself on any of them over a mess table. By then, they were overdue a journey into Krugarr’s territory.

Luckily, the Lem had provided Aleta with a transportable portal for this very purpose – one of his own devising. It relied on some freaky mystical shit rather than good old-fashioned fusion tech.

Aleta deployed it, doing her best not to gaze for too long into the swirling vortex that hovered above the rusty floor panels of the Bridge. It had a worryingly hungry look to it, and although she had passed through it several times before, it still made her queasy.

“You stop off here, kid,” she told Kraglin. “Ain’t safe for you to live on board much longer. Krugarr’s a good man – he’ll have a bunk for you.”

The victims of the Blooding had been transported, in several pieces, to the galley. Some were being freeze-dried, others preserved with honey and salt, while more still furnished the hooks, hung up to flavor for those who liked their men gamey.

Kraglin had, unsurprisingly, been subsisting only on protein packs since his arrival. He looked unhealthier than ever as a result, although that could just be the light from the portal: a sticky syrup-gold gleam that made everything shine like it had been painted in shellac.

“What about Yondu, captain?”

“What about him? He's coming to see Krugarr too - though he won't be staying." Aleta scratched the side of her nose. "You wanna say goodbye, now's your chance."

Yondu glanced up at his name. He sauntered over, bow-legged so his pants chafed on his thighs as little as possible. "Does he gotta go?" 

Aleta smacked the back of his head, over the quartz chunk his fucked-up sadist of a master had, at some point or another, hammered in his skull. Why? Aesthetic, Aleta presumed. She’d seen it glowing sometimes when Yondu whistled to that weird golden arrow. But he always shut up quick when she passed and feigned engrossment in the nearest patch of wall. She let him get on with it.

“Call me ‘cap’n’! How many times?”

“How many times, yourself? I ain’t no Ravager!”

“So you're just hangin’ out here until ya find yer way back to yer master?” They both turned to Kraglin, who shrugged apologetically, rubbing his patchy jumpsuit where it stuck to his belly and chest. “I mean, I ain’t one to judge or nothin’, but thas a lil’ bit messed up.”

“Understatement of the century.” Aleta nodded towards the portal, which had snipped a rift in reality a few paces ahead. “C’mon, kids. Day trip.”

"Does he gotta go?" Yondu repeated. 

Aleta, for some reason, found it hard to meet his eyes. "Sorry, kid. End of the road. This isn't a place for his sort."

Kraglin gazed at Yondu with his damp gray eyes. They were strange eyes: pale and ugly as the rest of him. They always seemed a blink away from crying.

"You should come with me,” he told Yondu. “Leave this place. And these nice, uh, lovely young women.”

“Please,” grunted Horla, doodling bored sketches on her star charts. “Be our guest.”

Luta flicked her in the ear, shaking her head.

Aleta, for some reason, found herself holding her breath.

“Nah,” said Yondu, after a pause.

Kraglin frowned. “Why not?”

“Cap’n Aleta wants to help me find my master. Krugarr don’t.” As if it was that simple. Maybe, in Yondu's mind, it was.

Cap’n Aleta did want to find his master, because Cap’n Aleta wanted to put a knife in him. But if Yondu knew that, Yondu would leave. And if Yondu left…

Well, it wouldn’t make much difference. Aleta's crew might actually perform at better capacity – no one had deserted, but a few Bridge posts had been conspicuously absent since Aleta started toting the kid around on her patrols.

She should let him go. Yondu couldn’t stay on Krugarr’s ship because of that whole _dependency_ thing. But Martinex had volunteered, and no matter Stakar’s opinions on the matter, Aleta was a captain. She had to put the needs of her crew first - a crew Yondu still denied being part of.

No point being sentimental about such things. No matter how much you wanted to be.

Aleta could do it. She could call Marty, tell him she'd be on Krugarr's ship, only a few jumps away. She could shuck this responsibility off her shoulders, like she used to take off her heavy coat at night and crawl into Stakar's bed unburdened.

Aleta worried a blood-blister into her lip. Her thumb hovered above her comm watch. Then, decisively, she shook her head and turned away. She led the way into the portal, Kraglin and Yondu trotting on her heels. 

 

* * *

 

 

Krugarr took Yondu aside for their usual session. Aleta and Luta came to a silent pact that they were going to spend the duration making Kraglin uncomfortable. It was some glorious teamwork: Luta loomed over him, breathing heavier than necessary, while Aleta sharpened one of her favorite knives on a solid-looking part of the tunnel wall.

Kraglin, to his credit, did his utmost to ignore them, rocking back and forth in his oversized spacer boots and watching the hypnotic swirl of otherlight through a porthole window. 

Krugarr returned with Yondu close behind, emerging from a fissure in his ship's glowing wall. The Lem gave Kraglin a slow perusal, from his scrappy mohawk to the bobble in his throat and his long, bony feet. 

Yondu must've talked about him in his therapy session. Aleta wondered what he'd had to say.

All too soon, she found out. 

 _The Xandarian will stay with you,_ Krugarr signed. 

Kraglin's mouth dropped open. He blurted the stupid question so Aleta didn't have to: “Whadda ya mean?”

Krugarr knotted a cat’s cradle into his long, four-jointed fingers, then gently untangled it again. His double-eyelids blinked, a translucent film unrolling first, followed by smooth scaled skin.

“He,” translated Aleta through gritted teeth, “thinks it would be _conducive_ to Yondu’s treatment to have another man aboard. Someone he can…”

Another flutter; another grimace.

“… _bond_ with.”

Luta (who'd snuck through the portal after them, hoping to nosy at Krugarr's decor) crossed her gigantic green arms. “Why? He got us.”

Aleta raised a brow. “You're volunteering to be Yondu’s friend?”

Yondu snorted. He was slow to forgive - another trait that amused Aleta as much as it infuriated her, deepspace being too harsh an environment to bother holding grudges. The indignity of being lugged about the ship over the skrull's shoulder was evidently still fresh in his mind. 

Luta's nostrils scrunched. “Pass, cap’n.”

“There we go. Yondu stays – and the Xandarian too.”

Yondu grinned. Kraglin failed to emulate. Aleta couldn't blame him. The boy wanted away from their dusky tomb of a galleon, its pantry swinging with dead men and its dormitories overflowing with women who wanted him to join his old crew. He cast a final, longing glance at the distorted tunnel of Krugarr's ship, before submitting to the hand Luta dropped on his shoulder, which steered him back into the portal and the ship that lay beyond.

Yondu headed after them, not bothering to give Krugarr a formal farewell. Rude little shit. Aleta would be lying, if she said she didn't like that about him, too.

She herself lingered a moment longer. Krugarr’s vessel was eerily silent – as silent as the man himself. The only noise was the wet suck of air through his gills.

Aleta rested her hand on her pistol pommel – then, recalling she was among allies, hooked the thumb through her belt instead. The flimsy shift she’d worn for the Blooding had been disposed of, along with the rest of their stained costumes. Another cruiser would be hunted before the next Blooding – which, gauging the general mood of the girls, would be far sooner than their regular bi-Standard schedule.

Yondu and Kraglin set the lot of them on edge – the girls for a whole host of reasons that mostly boiled down to well-rooted mistrust of their entire gender; Aleta from the constant stress of keeping them not-dead. Krugarr had better have a damn fine reason.

“Alright, you big red slug,” she growled. “Get talking.”

Krugarr’s silence spoke far more eloquently than words. Aleta harrumphed.

“ _Figuratively._ Signing, whatever. What do you and Yondu talk about?”

Another long look. Another grouchy gust of a sigh.

“Again, _figuratively._ ”

A twist of a digit, a rub of two others. _Patient-therapist confidentiality._

“Yeah, yeah,” Aleta muttered. “Fuck you too. You know, Stakar wanted me to help him because he thought my girls had been through the same crap?”

Krugarr nodded.

“Well, that’s bullshit. My girls _know_ the crap that happened to them weren’t right. That kid is so convinced it’s his sole purpose in life to be property that it kept him alive for two years in hell.”

Krugarr considered. _You care for him,_ he observed. Aleta tossed her shaggy mane back from her face.

“Don’t be a sentimental fuckwad. That’s Stakar’s job. Yondu _pisses me off_. So much potential, yet he wants to go back to being a lapdog. Makes me want to wring his neck.” 

As much as it made her want to cut the collar from it, the one that only Yondu could see.

Krugarr blinked at her.  _It was all he knew,_ he signed. I _suspect he was beginning to rebel against the Kree's hold by the time he was left on that ship. Most slaves are, by that age, as they realize just how much they are denied._ Another moist suck through the gills.  _However,_ _as the months passed, all progress was undone. Yondu needed a god, someone to pray to. That was what his Master became._

A god to pray to, huh?

Aleta didn't like it, but she understood. She'd had a god once too. And, much like Yondu's deity, that god had abandoned her, in her hour of need.

It took a while for that hurt to seep into you, blacken you inside, mildew crusting your bones. But once it did, you would never again bend the knee. Pain hurt, but it hardened too.

Aleta glanced back, towards the portal through which the boys had vanished. “If it’s not against your _patient-therapist confidentiality,_ what made you so convinced this Kraglin kid's good for Yondu?”

Krugarr arranged his hands accordingly. Aleta studied the message they imparted, and chewed on her nearest strand of matted hair in contemplation.

“Huh,” she said. "What sort of 'affection' are we talking?"

Krugarr told her. Aleta's eyebrows raised. 

"Wow. That's some in-depth therapy. He told you that much?"

_Not in words._

"Ah." Aleta snapped her fingers. "You're just meddling, again."

_I do not meddle!_

"Please! You're like an old woman. Trust me; I've got plenty on board. Yondu doesn't need your matchmaking efforts." 

Krugarr sniffed, lifting his chin.  _Perhaps I should offer them elsewhere? I provide_ _couples' counselling, should you and Stakar ever -_

Aleta blanched. Being in the same room as Stakar already filled her with an infuriating cocktail of want/hate/need. Add Krugarr's attempts at bond-building to the mix, and you had a recipe to make that cocktail a Molotov.

"No. Nope. This conversation is over. So long, you old red slug. When you see my good-for-nothing husband, tell him he's to eject the next stray out the airlock before anyone gets attached."

 _Terrible affliction, isn't it?_ Krugarr wanted to know.  _Sentiment._

Aleta knew more than enough sign language to curse him out, and she put it to excellent use.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **:dabs: sorry for the long wait! I've been busy on original novel projects and so forth. Thank you to each and every reader who's keeping this li'l fandom alive!**


	8. you've been so long

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you SO MUCH to each marvellous reviewer!**

As for _why_ Yondu might _like_ Kraglin as _more than a friend_ , Aleta had yet to work out.

She spent considerable time on it, glaring at him in profile, full-on, at three-quarter degrees. Whatever angle she tried, her eyes reported much the same: beaky face, sunken chin, pouchy hammocks under his eyes. Although that could just be fear.

“Why’s she lookin’ at me?” he whispered at Yondu from the corner of his mouth.

“’Cause she wants to eat ya,” Yondu replied. He lounged on the rec-room chair, rubbing his chilly blue toes. Aleta’s latest compromise – that he would at least wear socks, to stave off frostbite when wandering around the colder compartments that ringed the outskirts of the city-sized ship – went ignored, just like the rest. “Ain’t you heard? She’s the _Spider._ ”

 _If he is to cultivate relationships outside of his master,_ Krugarr had signed, _this ‘Kraglin’ is our best chance._

Aleta remained unconvinced.

“You ain’t good enough,” she said. Kraglin’s stubbly eyelashes dropped and rebounded again.

“Uh-uh-excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

Many people weren’t good enough for each other and still lived happy, rewarding lives. Like Stakar! No way was he _near_ her match. And –

Oh yeah. The divorce. Perhaps they made a poor analogy.

The Obfonteri kid wanted to be here about as much as Aleta’s crew wanted him around – which meant considerable friction, and more than one time when Aleta snuck into the rear observation room in search of solitude, only to find it stuffed with the female portion of her Bridge crew (all of whom had snuck off, pleading loo break, in search of the same).

This prompted the question of ‘if I’m fake-peeing and you’re fake-peeing, then who’s flying the ship?’

When the girls proved themselves incapable of drawing straws without dissolving into rabid brawls over who had to go and suffer with the menfolk, Aleta evicted the whole lot and hustled them back towards the ship’s central nodule, thanking the stars that there was no debris in hull-denting range.

She wasn’t sure what she expected, stomping through the door. Not what she saw.

Obfonteri stood behind Yondu, guiding his hands through the nav charts, the both of them overlaid in a spangling blanket of starlight.

 _Sabotage,_ was her first thought.

 _Revenge,_ her second. Maybe the kid had been closer to his old crew than he let on. It would be so easy for him to blast them towards the nearest singularity point, or star, or even one of the many rifts out here: glimmering slices in nothingness itself, through which gleamed the oily junk piles and garish cityscapes of Sakaar, World-Beyond-Worlds.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” She stormed forwards, Luta shifting to flank her, puffing out her already-ample muscle to swell at the seams of her deep green coat. “Get your fuckin’ hands off my ship –“

Kraglin sprung from Yondu like he’d superheated, snapping to attention. Seemed a few years hauling ice couldn’t dissolve that military training. “Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am – captain, I mean!”

Aleta loped into his personal space, hobnails registering the gradients of the patchwork floor in a discordant cacophony. “What. Were. You. Doing.”

“Simulation. See?” Yondu reached under the plinth, flicking a toggle back and forth. The starscape guttered and flared, made of nothing but photons. His smile was in equal parts smarmy and challenging. “An’ I don’t see what yer complainin’ about, bein’ as all y’all fucked off and left us to man the Bridge.”

“No.” Aleta shifted from one culprit to the next in a sinuous slide. “You ain’t _manning the Bridge._ Not until you earn my trust – and let me tell you, that’s gonna be a long time in coming.”

Yondu kicked up a foot, examining where a splinter of something had lodged in the ball. The skin looked a little tight, but not infected – nothing that couldn't be solved with the aid of tweezers and a sterile swab from Janyi.

“How’m I s’pposed to learn then? Said it yerself – I can’t fly no M-ship.”

“And I don’t _trust you to do that either._ You’ll just shoot off after your master.”

“The same master,” Yondu said, matching Aleta’s posture, “that you promised me we was gonna find. Well, it’s been two Lunars. Where is he, huh?”

Aleta resisted the urge to slap him. With her gauntlets, she was liable to take out an eye, and she could only blame so much on the kid falling down stairs. “You were on that ship two years. You’re only now getting impatient?”

Yondu’s metal teeth squeaked when they gritted. “I been waitin’, waitin’ for ya to say somethin’, do somethin’, to make me believe you was lookin’ for him.”

It was around this point Kraglin realized their innocent piloting lesson had been a ruse, made to lure the captain into a confrontation. For a man who, for the longest time, hadn’t been allowed to _think_ about defying his master, Yondu could sure manipulate a situation to his advantage.

He got it from her, Aleta liked to think.

Obfonteri dropped a tentative hand on Yondu’s shoulder. “I’m, uh, sure that cap’n’s goddit under control –“

“Yeah.” Aleta glowered at Yondu through her tangled fringe. “She has.”

Yondu’s demeanor changed as fast as if she’d pulled out a birthday cake for a toddler. “You’ve found him! Ya know where he is?”

“I got an idea.”

Not a lie. She’d put out feelers, course she had. Like a spider casting silk to start a web. She hadn’t needed many. Yondu told her his name – Ajax, of the Norridor noble line – and from what Aleta could tell, he was still very much at large. War General of the Gohlmar front.

While the infantry ground away day-in, day-out, worn down by attrition until there was nothing left but blood and plasma and other such battle effluvium, Generals were permitted the occasional holiday. Satellites roamed at a safe distance from the skirmishes, making their the trade off those willing to pay to watch the slaughter. Ajax frequented such respite centers – especially those with a majority Kree support.

Aleta gathered a handful of her thick, greasy hair, pulling until the sting outweighed the frustration.

“ _Stars._ Luta, set a course – show these a-holes how it's done. We're heading for the Warfront, girls.” Then, before they could start moaning - “I'll comm Charlie, let him know we're passing into his territory. He'll give us leave to hunt a few cruisers. It's rich pickings out that way, ladies, and they ain't gonna be expecting us.”

That made for an adequate incentive. But Kraglin and Yondu didn't partake in the bustle as twenty women suddenly decided they wanted to make themselves useful and headed to their abandoned posts.

Yondu looked at Aleta, all shiny eyed. Obfonteri studied him, decidedly not.

“This ain't a good idea,” he said.

Didn't Aleta know it?

“There should be a 'captain' in there somewhere.” She stalked to her chair, flinging herself on it in a rustle of leathery green. “You’re more than welcome to desert again, Obfonteri, seeing as that's your main skill in life.”

“Harsh,” rumbled Luta around her smirk. She lumbered over, leaning her vast bicep on the side of Aleta's throne.

Like the command chair of any self-respecting captain it was fully mobile, able to swing to face any part of the Bridge, and fucking uncomfortable without cushions. But perching on solid steel kept you alert. Ravager captains couldn't afford to get fat – or old, for that matter.

Poor old Vance. Terrans weren't built for durability. He was the shortest-lived their brethren, and no matter the flame Aleta nurtured for him after her divorce, it didn't make up for anything. Not the sag of his skin from his frame, the liver spots on his hands. The quake of his jowels when he talked and the hill-mound stoop of his back.

She stopped answering his comms twenty years back and had refused to look at him square-on at the Captains' mess ever since.

Rude? Stakar certainly thought so. Krugarr had other names for it, names like _post-traumatic stress disorder_ and _flashbacks_ whenever her gaze skirted past the old man at their table and projected her screaming children in his place.

But it was the fate of a functionally immortal woman to watch those around her perish. She just hoped her friends went out violently, rather than living out their years in a slow decline.

Yondu aged faster than Vance, faster than most species on spec. Aleta convinced herself that he already looked a little more mature than when she'd dragged him from that vent. A little bigger, a little bolder. He was a mayfly compared to her; there and gone again between two blinks.

She couldn't care about him. It would only hurt more in the long run.

And yet - damn it all. She wasn't sure she could stop.

“We go,” she said, with an edge of finality not even Kraglin dared question. “Girls, roll out the big guns. Competition's stiffer in this neck of the galactic wood – we need to be prepared. Luta, flag up the ports closest to where our cat's stationed. Yondu?”

Yondu bounced closer. Aleta yearned to smack the stupid smile off his face.

_You want me to let you go? Walk back into slavery?_

She thought of Krugarr, and what he might sign at her if he knew what she was planning. She doubted it would be civil.

Yondu's grin was wider and brighter than Aleta had ever seen. Gold fillings caught the light, the bristles on his chin forming a natural thin goatee. He'd gained muscle, following his ordeal in the Galleon's Graveyard, enough to look wiry rather than like a famine victim. With his shoulders back and his chest out-thrust, he fit the box of 'Ravager' far better than 'slave'.

“I want you to think about this,” she told him, a tone lower than usual. “Really, _honestly_ think about it. What you want. Everything you can do, as a freed man. You really wanna go back to being some warlord’s battle fodder?”

Yondu drew himself haughtily up. “There ain’t no greater glory –“

“Stop.” She caught his arm, gauntlets cutting the fragile undersides of his wrists. He winced, making to pull away. Aleta quelled him with a glare. “Listen. Listen to me, listen to yourself. You really believe your master cares for you? He survived the Graveyard, we know that now. So why didn’t he go back, if he loves you as much as you love him?”

Yondu’s lower lip jutted out, stubborn as the child he was. A kid, in everything but body and trauma. “He’s a warlord! You said that yourself. He’s busy, he has better things to do than –“

“Than rescue a slave? So you admit it. He doesn’t give a crap. You’re just a thing to him, like all the others.”

“No, he does!” Yondu shook his head. A mirror of her own frustration soured in his eyes. It was like they spoke two incompatible languages, the translators in their necks spitting randomized words. “You don’t understand – you can’t understand –“

“I think,” said Aleta quietly, motioning to the women around her, some of whom diligently primed their consoles while others watched the unfolding scene, “some of us understand all too well.”

Personally, she had trusted her so-called father for far too long. She might have given him another chance, after everything, if not for the children.

If that was what it took to break her from her cursed Eden in the light of the Hawkstar, what would be Yondu’s catalyst? The chisel to chip him from his master’s rock?

Aleta didn’t know. And despite everything, she didn’t look forwards to finding out.

When your heart got broken, you adapted or you snapped. Yondu struck her as a snapper. So young, so foolish. Chasing a pathetic dream.

Question was, did Aleta have enough cruelness inside her to wake him up?

“Don’t hurt him.”

Aleta glanced up. “Huh?”

“Don’t hurt him,” Yondu repeated, doing his utmost to loom. “Don’t you dare hurt my master, infidel thief.”

Aleta kicked her legs up to hook on her opposite chair arm. Her pelvis burned where it dug into the hardstone seat, but she ignored the pain – let it feed the cold ache inside her, the sense of pre-emptive loss.

“I won’t,” she lied. “I swear it on the flame.”

 

* * *

 

 

Yondu was right not to trust her. Her word hadn’t meant squat for a very long time.

Didn’t make Aleta any less disappointed in him.

 

* * *

 

 

The Gohlmar front had a long and chequered history. Straddling the No Man’s Space between different galactic kingdoms, it housed a selection of agricultural stations, dedicated to hydroponic farming and cloned meat-growth.

A garden of terraformed asteroids tumbled on all sides. Each rock carried a chronicle’s worth of memories, for Aleta and every other long-lived scum sucker like her. Unfortunately, most would be atomized, before this war was through.

“Stars,” she said, softly.

The space that flowed around her, littered with shrapnel from a million rounds of flak-fire and a hundred thousand ruptured ships, refused to correlate with her memories of a tranquil stretch of unclaimed space, free from the machinations of any Empire, where outcasts and outlaws could find a little peace. Those days were over. If peace dared blossom here, even for a moment, it was hastily stomped down on.

There was profit to be made off this war – not just for the arms and slave traders, or for whichever side claimed victory. The entertainment industry also made a very pretty mint.

Typical. And yet they called Aleta’s kind the criminals.

Aleta scoffed. The sharp punch of sound made Obfonteri jump. She didn’t turn, but her gaze twitched to his in their reflection. Their faces hovered ghost-like over the swarm of rubble and dust that shrouded the Gohlmar front in a rolling fog-bank, rocks tumbling weightless cartwheels and sparking brilliant where they glanced off the _Arachna’s_ shields.

“What?” she growled. “Why’re you here, anyway? I oughta keel haul you for what you done.”

Kraglin cringed like she’d punctuated each word with a kick. “I didn’t _know._ Weren’t my fault.”

“Yeah, you sure do like to tell yourself that. How long before you start taking some stars-damned responsibility?”

Kraglin sniffed. It sounded concerningly wet – but when Aleta glanced over, she was glad to note the only moisture on his face was the chilly dew-drop hanging from the end of his nose.

“He tricked me,” he said, more morose than a drowned rat. “Told me Horla were askin’ for my help on her ship. By the time she’d done yellin’ at me for touchin’ her ‘bird without permission, I figured Yondu’d headed for canteen. Only realized when he didn’t show up there or in the cabin.”

Aleta held up her hand. “Don’t need the play-by-play, boy.”

 _Of course_ Yondu stowed away on the first outwards-bound ship.

That had been Horla’s unmarked scout-craft, dispatched to get a read on the locale and determine whether it was safe for a Ravager fleet to make port.

Kid had practically been slathering since Aleta announced their roadtrip into Charlie’s territory. He’d hop off first chance he got, blend into the crowd, go in search of his precious master.

And then? Well, Aleta would lose him forever.

“What I wanna know,” she said, “is why you ain’t run after him.”

Kraglin, if anything, shrunk further. “He says it ain’t right for him to cosy up to me. Says his master wouldn’t like it, an’ – an’ I wouldn’t like his master when he’s angry.”

Aleta studied the puffs as shards of splintered hull-plate reflected from the shields. Poof, poof. Ravager funerals in pastel. “So you’re just gonna give up? Let him get away?”

Kraglin’s fists knotted, but the tension stretched only for a second. When it snapped, his shoulders drooped so far Aleta checked him over to ensure he hadn’t bust both collarbones. “S’what I do best.”

Ugh. Aleta was no agony aunt. She left the therapy to Krugarr.

“Wise choice,” she said, stepping up to the glass. Her reflection eclipsed the messy splay of debris and the occasional detached, charred limb abandoned in the black without burial rites of the pyre or the pit. “Just keep running. Don’t try to fix what’s broken, because chances are, there ain’t no repairing it. You can glue it back together, but it ain’t never gonna be whole. Honestly ain’t worth the effort.”

Kraglin scrabbled to his feet, from where he’d been slouched on the first step of the observation nodule. He fiddled with his sleeves. Long though the jumpsuit might be, his arms were longer, and a knobbly wrist joint protruded from either one, swapping sides when he rearranged the leather over his narrow back. “Is this, like, a pep-talk?”

“No.” Aleta sneered through the washy shine of her face and into the graveyard beyond, lit only by headlamp beams and the flicker of far-off plasma fire. “This is a ‘might as well quit while you’re ahead’ talk.”

Obfonteri let the pause spool out between them, a fragile breath of silence marred by rumbling engines.

Aleta sighed. “Trust me, kid. Sometimes it’s best to just accept it, y’know? Fate’s won. You can fight, and fight, and fight, and still lose – so what’s the point in fighting, huh? Just. Just _let it go._ If it’ll be, it’ll be, and if it won’t…”

“It won’t,” Kraglin finished. He joined her, staring into the grotty black shimmer of exhaust fumes, as they chugged through one cloud of cold ashes and into the next. Aleta didn’t nod. Didn’t do anything but stare into the dark – although her focus resided many lightyears away.

She lost to Stakar, battling the overwhelming surge of his consciousness as their children lay in atrophying heaps, withered flesh sloughing from their bones. She battered herself against the walls of her limbo, flailing, shrieking, _clawing_ to save them. Her children. Her reason for _being_.

And then the walls came tumbling down, and she was out, and the terrible blankness of oblivion disintegrated back into reality. She soared to Arcturus, the light of the Hawk god streaming behind her, hope buoying up her heart.

Fat lot of good that did.

“Let him go,” she finished, heavily. “He made up his stars-damned mind. Outcome’s set – try and change it, you might as well be shouting back a solar flare.”

Kraglin glanced at her sideways. “You don’t know that.” How did someone so young – so finite and forgettable, in comparison with her – speak as if he could ever understand?

There was no way this ended other than heartbreak – either Yondu’s or theirs. The harder you struggled, the sorer it hurt when you fell.

Kraglin shook his head. “No,” he said, wheeling about sharp enough to set himself off balance and stumbling for the door. “No, I ain’t just lettin’ go. I’m bringin’ him back, cap’n. I swear it. Yondu’s coming home.”

Big words, spoken from a big heart. Didn’t change the facts though, no matter how much Aleta wanted them to.

Yondu _wanted_ this. He _wanted_ to be a pet, a thing, a fucking _slave._ Because he’d been broken before he knew there was anything in his head to break, and his gauge for _normal_ sat so skew-whiff her own looked certain as a compass needle in comparison.

“Hold up,” she said. Kraglin’s boots ceased their clomp; he glanced back at her, one hand grasping the doorframe.

“Uh, I guess I’m gonna have to take an M-ship, ain’t I? I’ll leave it at the station if I don’t get him back – I won’t never steal from ya, ma’am…”

“Shuddit.”

Kraglin did.

Aleta heaved a long sigh, blowing out until her lungs strained. Beneath her gauntlets, light flickered on the tips of her fingers. Solid light, smooth as shingle-pebbles rounded by the waves.

Her power, the last gift the Hawkgod gave her. The only one she never rescinded.

Stakar would know who’d done the deed, once reports of the upcoming massacre wound their way back to the Ninety-nine. He’d sigh, shake his head, summon her back to the _Starhawk_ for a lecture.

Whatever. That was future-Aleta’s problem. Right now, she needed to fetch her boy.

“I’m coming with you,” she growled, and yanked off her gauntlets with her teeth.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Getting close to the end, now! Please, feed me your comments and kudos <3 Prepare for Aleta to go full battle mom!**


	9. and I've been putting out fire

The thing about scout missions was, they had to be silent. A lone M-ship wouldn’t cause much hullabaloo, even if it made berth on the Xandarian homeworld. Much like bees, Ravagers were only to be feared when they arrived in a swarm.

But a lone M-ship broadcasting back to the motherboat? That was a cause for concern.

So Horla flew down to the satellite with all comms on stealth-mode, accepting no communications from her crew. She wouldn’t know if an engineer pushed the wrong button and sent the core into meltdown. She wouldn’t know if Aleta went nuts and ganked her entire crew.

Equally, there was no way to warn her about her stowaway.

“He’ll have split by the time we make groundfall,” Aleta warned Kraglin, strapping her pistols to her waist. Two of them – it felt like a dual-wielding kind of day. “We split up. Follow your nose – but don’t be stupid. No barging into bars and yelling his name. If he knows we’re hunting him, he might spook.”

“He’s not an _animal,_ ” Kraglin argued. He was a bit better at standing up to her when it was just the two of them. They were on Aleta's M-ship, far from her crew. Defiance wasn’t a trait Aleta planned on nourishing in the boy, but it was gratifying to know he wasn't a complete wet blanket. “And we’re not hunting him either! This is a rescue. Right?”

"Quit fussing over _semantics_. We’re getting him back. If you care about him, you'll know that's all that matters." Kraglin looked wounded. Aleta sighed. “You cherish that,” she said, rapping Kraglin’s ribcage, over where a Xandarian’s heart sat, a little lower than her own. “You take damned good care of it, you understand me? Don’t let it fade.”

Kraglin tilted his head. “Is that what happened with you and Stakar? It faded?”

Brazen of him, to ask so bluntly. He was wrong, of course. Her and Stakar's love hadn't been given chance to dwindle. It had been torn from them, whipped to dust by the ravages of revved-up time.

Aleta scowled. “Don’t go asking personal questions. We ain’t at the in-law stage yet. Here." She held out a gun, gave it an enquiring little wave. “You know how to use it?”

“Course.” He sounded offended that she'd ask. He slid back the bolt to check on the plasma cartridge, then clamped it back into place. Aleta had loaned him a holster from their scrap bucket, the contents of which ebbed and rose as girls fell and girls joined and girls outgrew their leathers. Kraglin wore it strapped around his narrow hips. After depositing the gun, he slid the knives she offered him up his sleeves, tucking another down his collar to rest in the lining over his right pectoral. “Ready, cap’n.”

“Good lad.” Aleta prowled up the ladder, into the cockpit, filling the pilot’s seat with a sinuous twist. She patted the seat besides her. “Park that bony tush.”

Kraglin placed his backside as directed. He plugged in his belt, criss-crossing his chest in an elasticated harness. Aleta commed Luta to let them know the basics of their plan, toggling in a message by hand so Kraglin couldn’t snoop.

_If you hear no word within the hour, tell Stakar I’ve gone to do rescue his idiot baggage and provide him with my coordinates. Tell him all guns blazing._

She hit send as Kraglin cleared his throat.

“What if,” he started, while Aleta punched the controls and the M-ship swung vertical, the magnetic lock clamping it in place by the tailfins. Gravity dragged them against their straps, Aleta’s hair hanging around her in a greasy mourner's veil. Kraglin clung to his chair arms as the hangar doors creaked open far below, identical columns of M-ships lining the chute on every side. “What if he doesn’t want to come back?”

The magnet super-cooled, levitating an inch above its runner. Aleta ignited a miniature thruster burst, enough to give them momentum. Their needle-sharp, smoky green M-ship glided towards the drop zone in a frictionless slide, smooth as a diver cutting the surface of a pool.

“Simple,” she said, once they hovered over the glimmering forcefield, space swallowing all light beyond. “We remove his reason for staying. Sound good?”

Kraglin nodded. Aleta grinned. She released the clamp, bid goodbye to her stomach, and plunged into the black.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The station was nothing like the dives Aleta took her girls to on holiday. She could smell the artificial filtration chemicals on the air, for a start, rather than rot and sludge and sewage. There were no visible dead bodies – not even any drunk ones!

It was all spick and span, all very polished. The perfect place for rich fucks to watch a war.

Aleta strolled along the esplanade: one of several rings that encircled the station, intersecting with one another at angles. If she looked ahead, she saw the bustling hub of the port as if she was approaching from a steep forty-five degrees. But her boots didn't slip and her legs didn't run out from under her – it felt no different to strolling across the flat lawns back on Arcturus, her brother-husband by her side. Good ol' localized gravitation tech.

People – humanoids for the most part, with the occasional cepholopod squelching along in their midst – sifted around her, warded away by her and Kraglin's leathers. Kraglin might not wear the flame on his sleeve, but it turned out he _did_ have a menacing bone in his body. He sneered at their fellow pedestrians, who gave him a wide berth, although it was Aleta all eye-stalks swivelled back to.

_Is that?_

_No. It can't be._

_But it is. What business does the Spider have here?_

Whispers billowed up and down the dock, stirred by the vent-plumes that wobbled above each mooring. Aleta met the eyes of the few who dared stare. She solidified the light above her fingertips and gave the resultant golden cards a slow shuffle, each slim and sharp as a slice of diamond.

“Don’t ya need them gauntlets?” Kraglin muttered. “To stop yerself gettin’ hurt? Them things look mighty sharp, cap’n.”

Aleta snorted. “The gauntlets keep me from hurting everyone who pisses me off.”

“I thought you _killed_ people who piss you off.”

“You ain’t dead yet.”

Kraglin’s predator impersonation faltered. He stumbled over his next step, wringing the front of his jumpsuit. Aleta didn't bother hiding her grin.

She couldn’t comm Horla’s ship, but she could access her private frequency now they were within range. “Hey,” she murmured, activating her implanted commlink. “We got us a runaway. Blue, bad teeth, damn good whistler. You might know him?”

“Captain!” Horla sounded frantic – never a good sign. The woman didn’t ruffle easy, even in the depths of a Blooding. “You’re here!”

“Talk to me.” Aleta approached the join where the promenade fed into the main station. She raised her leg, placed it on the near-vertical wall, let the gravity readjust around her, and kept walking. Kraglin followed with far less finesse, tentatively dabbling his toes on the solid surface as if concerned they might slide straight through. He managed to avoid falling flat on his face though, which Aleta supposed was quite the achievement, for him. “What’s going on? Where is he?”

“As soon as I docked, bastard kid flarkin’ well jumped out the smuggler hatch and sprinted for the exit! Dammit, I knew we shouldn’ta taken him Blooding. His head's too big for his own darn good –“

“You got that right. Give me something to work with, Horla. Which direction did he go in?”

“I – I don’t know, I didn’t see –“

“Calm down. That’s an order.”

Horla breathed out. Composed herself. “Yes, cap’n,” she said, although Aleta heard the underlying tremble. Horla might not _like_ Yondu, but stars knew she’d blame herself if he wound up right back where he’d started: a dull-eyed toy, prettied up for others’ amusement.

Aleta nodded to herself. “Tell me what you can. What was he wearing?”

“He had his weird arrow-stick, and he was back in his loincloth.”

“He must want his master to recognize him. Okay. Where are you? I’ll take the opposite, and Kraglin can scout between.”

“The other man is here?” Horla’s distaste was evident. “Can we leave him when we go?”

“Horla,” said Aleta, warning. Leery though she might be, Horla knew when to get down to business. She steered herself back on track.

“I’m in the pleasure district. Bots as far as the eye can see – proper classy ones too. Figured if this master is missing his favorite squeeze, he might turn techno.”

“Alright.” Aleta snapped her fingers for Kraglin’s attention. He pressed close to her, prickly and thin-eyed, scowling at the throngs of milling nobles with his lips peeled up his dirty gums. “Hey. You listening?”

“These fuckers are here to watch soldiers die.”

“No shit. C’mon, we got a job to do.”

Kraglin snapped his jaws together, filed teeth interlocking with a click. Metal on enamel. Aleta didn’t doubt he’d like to get one of the passing jewel-studded throats between them.

“ _Focus."_ Aleta spun one of her light cards on the tip of a finger. _"_ I ain’t here to help you expel your frustrations against the Xandar elite.” They passed a woman jabbering into her holocomm, draped in a luxuriant bilgesnipe pelt. She tottered by in anti-grav heels, levitating a perilous inch over the chrome, too engrossed in her conversation to notice why her fellow bourgeoise were giving the duo a wide berth. Aleta sneakily selected another disc, snipping a sizeable chunk of the fur away – enough to make the flouncy thing worthless. “Even if they deserve it.”

“Right.” Kraglin let his shoulders droop from their hunch. “Where d’you want me to look?”

Aleta waved overhead. Jetties stuck out from the station like spokes on a massive wheel. “Check the other landing strips. I’m taking the bars, while Horla’s got the brothels.”

Kraglin’s assigned area was by far the largest, but he met the challenge head-on, weak chin clenched. Aleta had told Yondu she wouldn’t hurt his master, but Kraglin swore no such oaths. She almost hoped he was the one to catch up with the bastard, just so Yondu wasn’t forced to watch her break her word.

“Go careful,” she told Kraglin. “Don’t let that temper get the better of you.” This as a man sauntered towards the dock, watching a replay of the day’s battle on his holopad, chortling at every bright burst as Novacraft were engulfed by balls of fire. Aleta gripped Kraglin's shoulder until she was sure his clenched fists weren't going to find their way into that rich fucker's face. She dug her nails in until he turned to face her, instead. “If you get yourself arrested, you’re no help to anyone. Least of all Yondu."

He glared at her for a second - longer than most dared - before diverting his gaze to his feet. "Yeah. I know."

"We meet back at my ship, one hour from now. If you ain’t there, you get left.”

She didn’t bother asking if he remembered the route. She pushed him towards the next rung of a space-jetty, and headed into the nearest bar.

She dismissed the light cards. She’d summon them again if she needed them, but for now, she needed to blend in. Tucking the sliced panel of bilgesnipe fur around her shoulders, she twisted her smirk into something more suited to an upper-class funder of the Kree war effort, and shouldered her way into the crowd.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Three establishments later, each with a different theme – one neon; one jungle; one an exoticized and highly curtailed homage to Kree culture, snipped of all those pesky little unsavory facts about _slavery_ and _genocide_ and _annihilation of non-conformant species –_ and there was still no sign of Yondu. Aleta swapped words with Kraglin and Horla at regular intervals over the comms, checking on their process.

A flash of her light disc and she acquired a gossamer sleeve to add to her ensemble, knotting it around her face in a shimmering bandana. Anyone who looked closely would see the greasy hue of her green-stained leather, the bird’s nest quality of her hair. Markers that she didn’t belong. But so long as she slunk in the shadows, no one spared a glance.

She passed through pockets of music – miniature dancefloors ten feet across, where the tourists writhed and ground, slopping their drinks until they floundered in a sticky, many-limbed bundle. The pounding, heavy beat deafened you when you stepped into the designated areas, but faded away as soon as you passed through. Aleta didn’t so much as flinch.

She made a bee-line for the bar, eeling her way to the front and simpering her apologies at any who protested. Snuggling into her bolero, she gave the bartender a dainty wave. A ball of light glistened in her palm. The bartender, gulping, did the wise thing and ignored the line ahead. As he approached, Aleta extinguished the ball with a squeeze of her fist, and leaned over the bar to murmur: “Where would I find a Kree Accuser?”

The barman licked sweat from his top lip. He was slim and pretty, a smear of glitter beneath each eye. Under his tunic’s high neck, she caught the glint of a collar.

“Tell me,” she said, kinder. “I won’t let it get back to you.”

She couldn’t save them all. Couldn’t lose focus on her goal – getting Yondu back to the _Arachna,_ back to his sessions with Krugarr. Away from the monster who made him.

The boy bent at the waist, pressing his painted mouth closer to her ear. Seemed the regular serving slaves didn’t care so much about loyalty.

“The core,” he murmured, polishing a glass so vigorously that the squeak almost drowned out his words. “Underground. That’s where you’ll find the Accusers.”

Aleta slipped a credit chit over the table; it vanished into the bartender's sleeve. “Second question: has a young man come through asking the same question? Blue, red implant, wearing a loincloth?”

The bartender's eyes widened. “I saw him. But he didn’t ask, ma’am. He knew where to go.”

Aleta nodded. She gave the boy a rare smile and a wink for luck, and loped for the exit.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She stepped into the vertical shaft that burrowed towards the station’s core. Not vertical, of course – another flip of the gravity and the shaft became a tunnel, ovular and ribbed with glittering platinum buttresses.

The doors at its far end looked puny from a distance. But the scale of the tussling figures in front of it told her it would tower over her like a rearing hoarbest from the Jotunn plains.

...Wait.

Five tussling figures. Four security droids, and one familiar blue boy.

“Let me in!” His bellows reverberated, bouncing off the tunnel ceiling. By the time they reached Aleta the words had distorted beyond recognition, but she got the gist. “Let me in, I need to find my Master!”

Little fool. No collar, no chip – Stakar’s doctors removed his tracker before Janyi got a chance. Yondu might be an assassin, for all the droids knew. They weren't going to let him in.

For a moment, Aleta was foolish enough to hope it might stop him.

Then Yondu suplexed one, span, and kicked the next in its lone flashing eye. The bulb shattered a crashing glass cascade.

"Dammit," Aleta muttered, and started to run.

Yondu did well – one droid with a crushed processing unit and another effectively blinded, turning slow circles over the steel. But there were three more contenders, and throwing moves like that with no boots guaranteed slices. Yondu winced as he set his glass-pocked foot down on the floor, staggering, off-balance.

The three surviving droids clicked at each other in binary. They charged their stun-prods, shifted into a neat spearpoint formation, and began to close in.

Yondu feinted, dodged, but there was no escape. Soon they had him boxed against the wall. 

He needed an assist. Aleta flexed her hands, eyes narrowing.

_Flash._

Light speared one bot through its core. Another solidified wedge dropped on the second bot like an anvil. The third, she restrained with a gleaming rope. They’d need that one functioning, so that it could input its door codes.

Yondu stumbled away, bleeding toes slipping over the frictionless floor. He stared at the lights, jaw dropped. Then glanced back the way he came – to Aleta, who dashed along the corridor, grin eating her face.

That grin fell sharpish when she clocked Yondu’s scowl. “Don’t –“

Too late. Yondu dragged the restrained bot to the access panel and forcibly plunged its key-card into the slot.

The doors rumbled open. Huffer smoke threaded the air – a rich and heady stink. Narcotics and sex and oblivion.

Just what Yondu was searching for.

Yondu punched the bot’s wrist, snapping the keycard at its mooring. Kicking it away, careful not to touch the sun-bright rope, he stepped inside. His blood pooled on the plush red carpet: a navy footprint no amount of solvents could erase.

He glowered out at her through the gap in the doors. Then, muscles braiding along his arms and back, he heaved them closed.

Aleta’s arms pumped. Her heart hammered, her boots slammed steel.

Not fast enough. Never fast enough.

No. She wouldn't watch another child die. Not today.

“ _Yondu_!” she roared. And, in a single desperate motion, generated a shard of light and flung it – outright _hurled_ it – after him.

The doors clanked shut. The lock crackled, sparks puffing from the broken circuit. The bot’s keycard burst in a puffball of flame and acrid smoke.

Overhead, an alarm began its clamorous whinge. A dozen sprinklers emptied themselves over Aleta, plastering her hair to her face.

The fire burnt out as soon as it ignited. The sprinklers tinkled away to nothing. Aleta squeezed the dregs from her bilgesnipe ruff – then, in a fit of irritation, snatched the pelt off and stomped it into the ground, grinding her filthy boots over as much of it as possible. Then and only then, unwinding her bandana, did she assess her handiwork.

A plate of light held the doors apart. A milimeter from one side to the other, it was practically invisible when you looked at it straight on.

Seemed it hadn't been a wasted effort after all.

Aleta grinned. She clenched her fist. The light expanded, forcing the doors apart. Hydraulics wheezed, metal dented. From deep within the gate’s great hinges, there issued a mournful moan.

Aleta widened the gap until she saw a slice of the room beyond: lush and opulent, outfitted in warm reds that complemented the Kree skintone. The entire rear wall was set with rubies, thousands cascading over each other in a waterfall of frozen blood.

Yondu stood before it, gawking at her handiwork. He flinched when Aleta stepped through the gap, turning side-on so she could slot between the hefty girders and into the room beyond. She ignored the Kree warriors, caught in various stages of debauchery (wine on lips, needles in veins). They stared at the intruders, waiting for the first to snatch a warhammer and break the tension - but Aleta looked only at Yondu.

“Hi, kiddo. Miss me?”

“I… You… You just…”

Aleta waved her hand. The block of solid light shrunk back to a sliver, and the doors clanked gratefully closed, sporting a new dent but no worse for wear. “I did.”

“How?” Yondu shook himself, as if remembering he didn’t care. “What the hell you doin’ here? Why’d ya follow me?”

Aleta dragged him in, stomping on his wounded foot when he tried to evade her. She hugged him tight and hard, before subjecting him to a smack upside the head.

“Because I went to the effort of looking after you this long, dumbass. I ain’t gonna let you throw your life away.”

“What’chu talkin’ about?” Yondu panted. “I’m supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be –“

“I disagree.” The new voice – haughty, feminine – came from behind Yondu. The Kree noble stalked forwards, face painted in deep purple lines of what looked to be Xandarian blood. Her slave – a bare-breasted young woman of a paler blue than Yondu – quivered after her, head so used to bowing that her neck had atrophied that way, giving her a permanent stoop.

“Neither of you belong here,” the Kree woman continued, sneer accenting her voice. She hoisted the nearest Accuser’s hammer – he was too high to protest – and span it in a figure-of-eight as if it didn’t weigh more than Yondu and Aleta combined. “You will pay for your trespass. Have you any final words?”

“Yeah,” said Aleta, as Yondu shrunk behind her. “At least teach your slaves to wear clothes. You know how hard it is to keep this idiot decent?”

“Light manipulation tricks," murmured another Kree. "That green coat… Why, Lady Kanila, I do believe this is the pirate known as the Spider.”

“Indeed." Kanila's violet eyes swept over the pair of them, lodging on Yondu. “Did you break into our enclave to return our property?” Her lips – painted the same color as her eyes, dark and rich as blackberry wine – tweaked up at one edge. “How thoughtful. Who is the owner of this little creature?”

Yondu piped up before Aleta got the chance. “My Master is Accuser Rastor of the Ronabi clan, mistress. I was stolen by this infidel and her friends, an’ I just wanted to come back an’ –“

“Stolen. So you’re not a deserter.” Kanila thumbed her plump underlip. “But you speak out of turn. I addressed the freedwoman, slave. Remember your place before...” Her ring-laden fingers tightened around the hammer shaft. “I crush it into your skull.”

Yondu’s mouth clicked shut. He bowed his head and was silent.

Aleta crossed her arms. She’d wait to see how this played out, she decided. She’d hoped to encounter Rastor in private, where she could slip a light-spun blade through his throat. Accusers were dangerous, even when inebriated – she’d rather face them one at once. Like this, against twenty plus, the odds weren’t on her side.

Kanila raised her voice. “Lord Rastor! I do believe we found some lost property.”

The curtain hiding one of the private booths at the rear of the chamber twitched, then reeled back entirely. The man behind it cut a surprising figure, far from the fat old lech Aleta’s imagination span up, who liked to prey on boys who didn’t have the right to say no. He was conventionally handsome, jaw perhaps too strong and nose too weak, but otherwise he might have been carved from lapis lazuli. He tugged his pants up his hips, the discarded robes of his Accuser costume visible through the drapes.

As was the kid on the bed, wearing only a loincloth.

He rolled onto his stomach and peeped at the goings on through curious pink eyes. A thin crest sprouted from his back, the same color as the ruby cascade.

Aleta’s blood pounded in her ears. How much time had passed? Enough for Kraglin and Horla to meet up empty-handed, and hypothesize as to where their captain might’ve gone? Enough for Luta to send the emergency convene signal to Stakar?

She had to wait for reinforcements. But dammit, if she didn’t want to kill each and every one of these freaks where they stood – or lounged, or draped themselves over cushioned steps, their slaves pressing pipes to slack blue lips.

She would daub this room black with their blood. She swore it, even as she took a step in front of Yondu, simmering up at her foe.

Rastor raised one eyebrow at her. Then raised both, as Yondu elbowed her out the way, practically vibrating, grin so wide it pricked tears at the corners of his eyes.

“Impossible. _Yondu?_ ”

“Yes, master,” said Yondu and the boy on the bed, at the same time. Rastor ignored his current squeeze – stars, the boy couldn’t be more than twelve, and considering how quickly Centaurians aged, in terms of experience, that translated to even younger. Bile churned at the back of Aleta’s throat. Rastor studied the young man before him, head cocked to one side. Yondu smiled...

...And the Accuser recoiled.

“Eugh! Your teeth – disgusting!”

Yondu frowned. He took a step forwards, bloody foot dragging on the carpet. “Master, I’m –“

Rastor shook his head. “And you’re dirtying the floor. How repulsive.”

Kanila watched the interaction, spinning her warhammer in slow circles. “I take it that you don’t want him back?”

Rastor shuddered. “Stars no. He’s older than I like now anyway. I’d auction him off, but –“ His gaze swung to Aleta, who clutched the pommels of both guns. Could she draw them before Kanila swung the hammer, dashed Yondu’s brains out in a chunky fresco? Not worth the risk. “He’s lived with freedmen too long.”

“Freedwomen,” Aleta growled.

Rastor continued as if he didn’t hear. “The reconditioning will take years, and it won't be as effective the second time around. He might even be a liability on the warfront.”

“Best dispose of him now,” Kanila agreed.

Aleta was the only one who actually looked at Yondu. Not at his teeth, or his sliced foot, or the residual bruises from his fisticuffs with the bouncer-bots. But at the quiver in his forearms as he clenched his fists so tight that the tendons stuck out like cabling shrink-wrapped in blue. The palpitating vein in his forehead, under the criss-crossed scars.

The whistles that laced his words.

“You don’t want me anymore.”

At his waist, the arrow shook just as much as he did.

Rastor scoffed. “That is no way to address your Master. You’re right, Kanila – he’s worse than useless.” He turned to Aleta. "I hope you don’t expect financial compensation. I’d much rather you had left him on that ship, to rot with the rest.”

The arrow _glowed._ Just a little. Aleta frowned, glancing at it from the corner of her eye.

“I didn’t come here for money,” she said. “Only justice.”

“How very noble of you. Those are high sentiments, for an infidel thief.”

Through the warped plates of the doors, Aleta heard voices. Kraglin’s, Horla’s, calling her name. And another voice too...

Aleta's smirk tickled the corner of her lips. Seemed the cavalry had arrived.

Yondu, meanwhile, had contracted a serious case of the shivers. “You told me you’d come back for me,” he hissed, and this time the light streamed from his implant and his eyes, not just the arrow notched on the string of his loincloth. “You told me you _loved_ me.”

Aleta had never seen Yondu’s implant pull that trick before, but the crew were closing upon them, and it distracted the Kree from the gleam of Stakar’s solar wings.

Rastor snorted. “I owe you nothing. I told you what I did so that you would let me get into the escape pod unimpeded." He shook his head. "Honestly, such impertinence. I should’ve disposed of you as soon as the weapons experiment failed. Kanila, give me the hammer. I'll deal with this myself.” 

Kanila handed it over, one hand propped on a shapely hip. "Try not to make too much of a mess."

Rastor nodded. He twirled the hammer effortlessly, the metal burnished with Xandarian blood.

Yondu stood before him, petrified but for his tense fists and the odd tremble of that arrow. He was so small in comparison to the Kree, lamed and broken, not even glaring in defiance as Rastor finished his speech:

“If our ship hadn’t become mired in that asteroid belt, as soon as we returned to Kreespace I would’ve fed you into the recycling plant. Now – either bow your head and accept your death, or leave this place and take it upon yourself to end your life. You've already caused enough trouble."

Yondu’s crest flashed. His head raised. He whistled, and Rastor goggled at the smoking hole in his chest.

“It worked?” he asked the universe at large, before collapsing. His knees hit the floor first, then his shoulder. Then he slumped forwards and lay still, the stain on the carpet slowly growing.

His boy was the first to react. The other Accusers were, for the most part, addled or stupefied by their drugs. But that child – Yondu mark-2 – stared at his master, his fallen colossus, his reason for being alive.

“No!” he shrieked. He rushed at Aleta and his namesake, clean white teeth bared around a furious shriek.

Kanila jumped to life next, snatching the warhammer up once more. Aleta shot her through the throat before she could swing it.

Yondu stood shellshocked. His arrow stuttered, attached to his side by a scintillating red thread. It pulled taut as a leash, keeping the slim needle in place. He would’ve let the kid bite his ankles, if Aleta hadn't snagged him by his high red crest. 

The boy screamed again, snapping and flailing. But the harder she pinched the limper his limbs swung, until she could sweep him into a restraining hug.

As soon as she released his crest the fight restarted. He wriggled like a worm on a hook, ramming elbows and knees against any part of her in reach.

Aleta held firm. She clasped his wrists together in one hand. Then, glaring at the rousing Accusers, she clenched her fist, forcing the sliver of light between the doors to widen once more.

Stakar blasted through from the other side. Then it was all noise, all chaos. atrium swarmed with Ravagers of all different colors and factions, cocking blasters and cracking knuckles like ants from a kicked nest.

Her husband – _ex,_ she had to remind herself – stormed at the front of the pack, mouth a taut slash through his stubble. His solar wings blazed from his shoulders, bright enough to induce migraines – most of the Ravager horde had opted for sunglasses.

“Who do we kill?"

Aleta ignored him, for now. She beckoned to Horla, and passed her the kicking, wiggling bundle of boy.

“Get him to safety,” she said. "Don't lose this one."

Horla must still be embarrassed about letting Yondu get the drop on her; she didn't argue.

Yondu - the elder one, Aleta's one - whistled again. His arrow snapped back to his fist.

He looked at Aleta. She looked at him. Then she turned to Stakar. “Don’t hurt the slaves," she ordered - and damn, it felt good, for him to be following her lead. "But as for the rest of it..."

Stakar's wings pulsed like a neutron star. “Yes?”

Aleta cracked her knuckles, bared a grin. “Be a darling, Starhawk, and help me burn this place to the ground.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **SHAMELESSLY UNEDITED because adulthood leaves little time for fic. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it!**


	10. with gasoline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **I'm sorry....**

How had it happened?

Aleta didn’t know, not really. That was her fault. All of it – her fault. Her fault for sending Horla off without an escort. Her fault for not keeping an eye on Yondu. Her fault, her fault, _her fault._

A warm hand descended on her shoulder. It squeezed there, briefly, and retreated again.

“It’s not your fault,” Stakar lied.

Aleta shrugged him off. She didn’t need to hear what she knew to be false. She should’ve been there. She should’ve _been there._

Kraglin knelt beside him, a pale blue hand clasped in his. The casualties from the battle were strewn around them, Ravagers putting their dying friends to rest with efficient blasts of a plasma pistol. The Kree, they left to suffer. Their wails and whimpers made a forlorn backdrop to an already shitty situation. Aleta did her best to drown them out as she shifted to crouch by Yondu’s side.

“Hey, kid. How d’you feel?”

“Like,” Yondu rasped, squeezing weakly at Kraglin’s fingers, “I took a damn Kree warhammer to the chest.”

Aleta couldn’t look at it – the concave crater where there'd once been ribs. The rudimentary battlefield life-support system kept Yondu conscious – but only long enough to consent to this. And she hated to ask him, hated to give up hope – but that was the way of the world.

Some victims were past salvation. And whether she rocked her daughter in her arms as wrinkled lips whimpered ‘mommy’ before crumbling to dust, or clasped the grinning face of a Kree slave who’d changed her life, there was nothing more she could do.

Aleta wasn’t used to being powerless. She found that she didn't enjoy it.

Was there any point in not knowing death, if you couldn’t prevent the passing of those you loved?

“It’s okay.” Whatever Yondu saw in her eyes – not tears; Aleta hadn’t shed those in centuries – it made him want to console her. Soft-hearted little shit.

Not like the rabid boy struggling against Charlie, screeching as the stray plasma shot that had killed Horla ate its way through his crest.

“It’s okay, it don’t hurt no more," Yondu continued. "An’ – an’ the arrow.” He nodded to the shrieking kid, who projected a fat glob of spit in answer, to splatter beside Yondu’s head. “I want him to have it. B-but’chu gotta tell him, cap’n. Ya gotta tell him, ya don’t fly it with yer head. Ya gotta use yer…”

“Infidels!” The brat shrieked. His accent was even thicker than Yondu’s, turned to slurry by his sobs. “Murderers! Y’all killed my master, y’all killed him, y’all killed all of them! Monsters, monsters, _monsters –_ “

Aleta’s molars grated. “Shut him up, Charlie,” she hissed. “Before I do it for you.“

Kraglin stooped over Yondu, snivelling away like a leaky faucet. Yondu reached past him to grip Aleta’s sleeve. “Don’t hate him, cap’n. Don’tchu… Don’t’chu dare…”

A cough rattled what was left of his ribs. More blood splattered from his mouth, to join what already caked his stubble and collarbones. Aleta’s own throat closed up at the sight.

“I make no promises,” she said gruffly. “Especially if he’s half as much a little prick as you.”

Charlie shifted his palm to cover the kid’s mouth – and caught a good glimpse of the corroding crest in the process. “Shit! We gotta do the operation now!”

Stakar nodded. He might not have known Yondu like Aleta did, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t share in her sorrow. His eyes lingered longest on her, before they turned to their latest recruit. “This is a very brave thing that you’re doing.”

Yondu choked on his next wet mouthful. Kraglin stifled a sniffle. He rubbed soothing circles on his shoulder until Yondu could speak without hacking up lumps of his lungs.

“Kid needs the arrow more than I’m gonna,” he managed, flashing a fangy, blood-stained grin. “I got what I wanted.”

Aleta should stand, get out of the way. Let Martinex take her place, armed with his scalpel and a dozen delicate screwdrivers, designed for unfastening prosthetics. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t leave him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her fingertips brushed Yondu’s lips. They withdrew, dripping navy. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“M’sorry I ran away.” Yondu wheezed out another sticky glob, shoulders heaving under Stakar’s gentling palm. “S’rry I – I shoulda stayed, you was right, you was –“

“Shh. Don’t talk.” Aleta leaned in. She pressed a kiss on his forehead, ignoring the sputter of warm blood against her collar, the fingers curling weakly into her jacket.

“You done good,” she told him seriously, gathering his hand in hers. “So good. Annoying blighter, right up to the end. But damned if you weren’t _my_ blighter.”

Martinex clinked from foot to foot behind them. “Aleta,” he said quietly. “There is only a small window in which we can make the transplant, after the boy’s crest is cut –“

Aleta wiped under her nose, smearing the drip on the back of her sleeve. Funny, how other parts managed to run while her eyes stayed dry. “You can’t wait another minute? Until after he’s…?”

Yondu managed to turn his head to look at his little doppelganger, still whimpering in Charlie's arms, twisting away from the plasma burn. “No,” he wheezed. “No, ya gotta do it now. S’okay. S’okay, I can’t feel nothin’.” He managed a shaky wink at Martinex. “G-gonna be like a tickle. Right?”

The life-support consisted of a wire spliced into Yondu’s spinal cord, a tube jammed in his airways and an artificial heart-pump. Rudimentary but effective. In this situation though, it wasn’t keeping him breathing long enough to haul to a medical center. It just staved off the inevitable.

Stakar gripped Aleta’s shoulder and, for the second time, pushed her away from her dying child.

She put up a token resistance, futile though it was. Stakar kept his arms locked around her. He bore each jab of her elbows into his belly with a quiet, martyr-like _oof_.

They’d won the fight, but lost Yondu. The least they could do was take his last offering, use it to save the whelp who shared his name. Even if that whelp wasn’t grateful.

“Lemme go!” he screamed, as Charlie laid his kukri against his sizzling crest. “Why’s he get to die with Master? Ain’t fair, ain’t fair! He’s a traitor! I wanna die too!”

“He,” growled Aleta, shaking free of Stakar, “is giving you the best damn gift of your stars-forsaken life. So you best shut up and survive, you li'l shit, otherwise I’m gonna drag you back from the stars-damned afterlife myself.”

Charlie met her eyes. Received the nod. He sheared down in a single sweep.

The kid’s scream could’ve shattered glass. But then the noise crackled off; his eyes rolled back.

Martinex touched Kraglin’s hand. Together they helped lift the older Centaurian and roll him onto his front, crushing his broken chest to bare the back of his head. Aleta shuddered at the noise – the crunch and scrape of rib fragments, the squelch of organs past repair.

Stakar dared try to hold her. Aleta gave him a glare that said she'd scratch whatever appendage he put within reach, and he - sensibly - withdrew.

“He can’t feel nothin’,” Kraglin whispered, raising moist eyes to Martinex. “Promise me that.”

Yondu didn’t have enough breath to confirm it. But when Martinex inserted the scalpel into the lip of bunched skin around the implant, wiggling it to loosen it until he could fit in the screwdriver and access the metal skullplate beneath, he didn’t make a sound.

When Aleta squatted beside him, she saw the moment his eyelashes fluttered closed and Yondu Udonta smiled his last.

 

 

* * *

 

  

“It’s too _heavy._ I fuckin’ _hate_ it.”

“And you hate me,” Aleta intoned boredly. She pushed the child against Stakar’s midriff as he clawed at the implant jammed in the top of his skull, threatening to shred straight through the bandages. “And him. And all of us. As you’ve said, many times.”

Stakar glanced down at the child, who promptly stuck his tongue out and snapped his teeth. “Um,” he said. “What’s this?”

Aleta rolled her eyes. “I’ve had my turn. You take this one. There’s another coming too – the Xandarian kid. Can’t put him up any longer. Girls’re grieving Horla, and they’ll find a way to pin the blame on him.”

“You need to _control_ them more.” But that was an old argument, thin-worn and flimsy. Aleta wouldn’t force her girls into anything – she knew better than to act the despot among those who’d been owned before. Stakar let it drop, gently prying the boy’s hands from his head.

He let his wrist stray within biting distance, and before Aleta could issue a warning – not that she planned on it – Yondu pounced.

 _Chomp_.

“Ow! What the –“

“That,” said Yondu proudly, little chin thrust up in the air, “is what’chu get for stealin’ my Master’s _property._ ”

Stakar’s bewilderment was too hilarious not to win a laugh.

“Have fun with that,” Aleta told him, starting for the exit.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To find Obfonteri and make him clean out his cabin.”

Stakar shook his head. “You can’t cut this child out of your life, Aleta. He meant something to… To...”

“Yondu Mark-1?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“We’re both thinking it.”

“Doesn’t mean you should _say_ it.” Yet another ancient point of contention, which they would bicker over for centuries yet. “Look, Aleta. He needs you in his life. He needs –“

“A mother?”

“My mommy sold me,” said Yondu. He sneered at Aleta, big and ugly, an adult’s expression transposed onto the face of a child. “Says I were just another mouth to feed, so I might as well earn my keep as a hole to fuck. I don’t need another mom. Specially not no master-murderin’ _whore._ ”

“There.” Aleta waved to him. “He doesn’t need one.”

“He doesn’t know what he needs!”

Yondu bit him again for that. In Aleta’s opinion, Stakar deserved it.

“Look,” she said quietly, once the brat had been pawned off on Martinex – whose diamond-coated skin had already snapped out two of his teeth, a canine and a molar, both now replaced with brilliant gold. “I saw Yondu’s ashes shine yesterday. I don’t ever want to see it again.”

Stakar sighed, examining his new incisor-shaped indents with a slight pout. Unsurprising – he was the sort of idiot to present his hand to feral cats on Knowhere and act confused when they gave him rabies.

“You _know_ he ages fast,” he said, as if Yondu couldn’t hear. “You _know_ he’ll die before us –“

“I need to find Kraglin.”

She didn’t look at the boy. Couldn’t bear it: the similar facial structure, the pink eyes that went from awe-struck whenever he pressed his nose to a porthole, to slitted and suspicious whenever a Ravager spoke. Most likely, they’d been related – a Centaurian family who’d struck a deal, selling one of every three children to feed the rest.

Give him a few years, and he’d be the spitting image.

Aleta tried not to think about how many other little Yondus were under Accusers at this very moment. She turned in a brisk green snap of leather and left.

 

 

* * *

  

 

“So, what now?”

“What d’ya mean, what now?”

“I mean…” Aleta leaned her shoulder on the glass beside him, the chill soaking through her leathers. The _Arachna_ had docked onto the _Starhawk_ for the first time in most of the crew's living memory. But here Kraglin remained – mooching about her anterior observation nodule, gazing out at the cold grey grit of Yondu’s ashes. “Are you gonna stay with Stakar and the brat? Or go your own way? Plenty of ice-haulers headed into the black.”

Kraglin shook his head. Weak though his chin was, it was clenched tight enough to wrinkle, like a fingertip after a hot steam bath. “I’m stayin’ with him.”

Sounded like he meant it too – just as she’d feared. Aleta sighed.

“You realize he’s gonna age faster than you? Twice as fast, if not faster?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re – what? Twenty-five?”

“About.” He shifted his bony shoulders, self-conscious. “I, uh, kinda lost track lately.”

Aleta understood that feeling. “Right. By the time you’re thirty, he’ll pass as twenty. By the time you’re forty, he’ll look forty-five, and sixty another five years after that.”

Kraglin seemed to have been waiting for this. “I don’t care,” he said, glowering up at her with as much defiance as his weaselly little face could muster. “I’m gonna look out for him. Up until the end, no matter what that end is. S’what Yondu woulda wanted.”

Way to rub in the guilt. Aleta crossed her arms, cudgelling her conscience until it stopped insisting that by turning her back on the boy, she was abandoning Yondu’s legacy. “Age ain’t a pretty way to go.”

“Neither’s the nasty end of a blaster. Most likely, both of us take that route.”

Aleta didn’t have any argument. She nodded, squeezed her shoulder, and – once more – bade him luck.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Next time she saw Kraglin, he was thirty. As predicted, Yondu made the spitting image of his predecessor. He gored her eyes as he took his place at the captain’s table, grinning up at Stakar like one of those irritating yappy lap-dogs Xandarian women toted about, which Aleta had occasionally been known to use as target-practice.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Time after that, she stood at Stakar’s side, numb to her boots as she cast her vote – _not exile._ It was among the minority.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Time after that? It was at the other end of a video-comm. His eyes were watery as she remembered, and Aleta knew immediately what he was going to say.

“That bastard. I told Stakar I didn’t want to see his pyre.”

Kraglin shook his head, dashing tears to either side. “Ain’t that,” he sniffed. “But we ain’t got the proper med-equipment, an’ he’s in a real bad way and I know you voted for him to stay an’, an’, _I didn’t know who else to call…_ ”

Aleta hung up. But she got their coordinates first.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Stakar approached her that night. He seemed nervous.

 _Good,_ she thought.

“He’ll be taken off the breathing apparatus this afternoon,” he said, efficient as if he was delivering the doctor’s report. Like that was all this was: a transfer of information regarding a mutual friend. “It’ll be difficult for the first two days. His new lungs have to learn to work on their own.”

Technology had improved since the first time they lost a Yondu, drowned in his own blood on the floor of a Kree seraglio. Everything moved on around Stakar and Aleta, and they, ancient slivers from a bygone time, had to sprint to keep up.

Aleta finished rubbing down her pistol casing. She turned her attention to the bolt mechanism, pushing her pipecleaner through the accumulated gunge.

“He’s tough,” she said. “He can manage.”

“Just like you.” That was uttered a tone below Stakar’s usual register. He promptly coughed and carded through his hair.

Aleta concentrated. If she jiggled the pipecleaner side to side, then pushed _just so –_

Pop. It punctured the clog, slipping through the cervix of old cold plasma residue, into the chamber beyond. Just like that. A blockage gone, a boil lanced. All of it drained away.

“Just like me,” she said.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Yondu’s eyes cracked open, he found a Spider slouched on the chair by the bed. Kraglin drooled on her shoulder and Peter on his. The Guardians were on the floor, Gamora and Mantis using Drax as a pillow while Rocket curled on Peter’s lap, Groot cuddled safe in his arms.

Stakar loomed in the doorway – damn near giving Yondu a heart attack and finishing the job permanent-like.

When he noticed the wide-eyed stare, he tipped Yondu a single nod and padded softly away, the door sliding shut silk-soft behind him.

Yondu let himself relax. His lungs strained in his chest, and the condensation from the back of his oxygen mask dribbled down his nose. Whatever drugs they had him on, it was good shit. Made everything washy and wavery and just a touch melty-looking, like wax sculptures left out at high noon.

 _Family’s all here,_ thought Yondu Udonta, and drifted back to sleep.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **I CAN ONLY APOLOGIZE FOR THAT TWIST (but not really, mwahahahaha). Next fic on my upload schedule is Pick Up A Polliwog, where Yondu gets accidentally-pregnant after fishing a tadpole out of a pond on Alpha Centauri-IV and trying to smuggle it off-world in his pouch. Turns out, it's a Centaurian nymph.... Tune in for more shenanigans! And thank you all SO MUCH for encouraging me through this story!**

**Author's Note:**

> **I love every comment / kudos!**


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